The Very Long Night Of Harry Potter
by bibliophile20
Summary: Ron and Hermione bring an unconscious Harry to St. Mungo's, where a long night stretches out before them...Rated T for violence in later chapters
1. Chapter 1 7:00 PM

The Very Long Night of Harry Potter

_Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or any aspect of JKR's wonderful world._

Chapter 1 – 7:00 P.M.

Three people Apparated into the receiving room of St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, covered in mud and grime, two of them supporting the third, who appeared to be unconscious. The two conscious ones immediately began yelling for Healers to come as they laid their friend down on the floor.

Startled by the unusual entrance the three had made, the other occupants of the waiting room began to look at this latest arrival, sizing him up. About seventeen years old by the look of him, medium-high height, medium but solid build, untidy black hair covered in dirt and grime and on his forehead…

One witch nudged her seat-neighbor. "It's Harry Potter! Look, you can see his scar, there on his forehead!" she whispered. With that, the rest of the waiting room inhabitants abandoned all pretenses and watching as the Healers came running in to assist the boy and girl who had come in with him, and who were alternately trying to help Harry and glaring daggers, metaphorically, at the gathered crowd.

One of the Healers conjured a stretcher and together, the boy and girl and several of the Healers lifted him onto it, and proceeded to move him out of the waiting room and into the hospital proper, leaving behind them a boiling caldron of discussion and speculation in the waiting room.

"Harry Potter, here?"

"What do you think happened to him?"

"Do you reckon he dueled He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named again?"

"How'd he get away?"

"Maybe he lost."

"Maybe he won."

At this statement, all of the various wizards and witches in the waiting room seemed to cheer up significantly and they continued to discuss the various possibilities with a great deal of excitement…

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Deeper inside St. Mungo's, the girl and boy who had come in with Harry were sitting at the desk of the Master Healer, a somewhat elderly woman who reminded them, in a rather unspecified way, of Headmistress McGonagall.

Looking between the two of them, she said, "Mr. Weasley, Ms. Granger, we are trying to help Mr. Potter, but his condition is… confusing to say the least. Can you tell me anything, anything at all, about what triggered this?"

Ron and Hermione looked at each other, obviously wishing that they could say something, but holding themselves in check for some unknown reason. Hermione spoke up, "Healer Pomfrey, we wish we could tell you, but we're not allowed to." Just as the older sister of the Hogwarts nurse was about to protest this, a voice came from one of the portraits on the wall, that of Dilys Derwent, the one-time Healer and Hogwarts headmistress.

"Ms. Granger, I told Dumbledore what happened, and he says that you can trust her. Matter of fact, here he is now," said the painting of the long gone witch as she moved over in her frame to make way for an image of Albus Dumbledore.

The portrait-bound headmaster nodded, acknowledging Ron and Hermione, and said, "Ms. Granger, Mr. Weasley, you may inform Healer Pomfrey what has transpired. I am also curious as to what has happened," he said, leaning against the edge of the frame. "I assume that this has to do with either the cup or the locket?"

Ron and Hermione looked at each other again, clearly not having anticipated this development. After a moment's silent consultation with each other, Hermione spoke up.

"This will take a few minutes, Healer Pomfrey, but this is essentially what happened…"

Over the next few minutes, Ron, Hermione and Dumbledore's image filled in the increasingly aghast Healer about Voldemort's Horcruxes, and then told her how they were protected against intruders…

"So Harry had to drink the potion around the cup-Horcrux and," Hermione patted down her robes and extracted a small vial of potion from a side pocket, "I managed to save this bit in here to analyze later, it was in the cup itself." She handed the vial of thick liquid over to the rather appalled Master Healer, who then called another Healer in.

"Healer Smethwyck, take this," she said as handed him the vial, "and start making an antidote to it, right away." As the Healer held up the vial, examining its contents with a frown on his face, she shouted, "NOW!"

After the resounding crack of Healer Smethwyck Disapparating faded from the office, Pomfrey turned back to Hermione, who continued, "So after we managed to escape the repository, and back to our headquarters, Harry took out the cup and tried to destroy it using the reducing jinx and it worked." Ron held up the mangled remains of what had once been a rather magnificent cup. "But then there was this bright blue flash that wasn't from the spell, and next thing we know Harry's on the floor, screaming and convulsing violently, and then he went limp. We sort of panicked and brought him here. And that's it, that's what happened," she finished somewhat lamely.

Master Healer Pomfrey seemed to digest this for several minutes as she sat at her desk silently. After about five or six minutes, she got up and said to the two of them, "Come with me. We're going to go check on Mr. Potter."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Harry came to, feeling sore and in pain, and sat up. For a few moments he couldn't identify where he was until he realized that he didn't have his glasses on. Squinting, he brought the room into focus and it was undeniably… "What am I doing at Hogwarts?" he murmured to himself, for he was undoubtedly in the dormitory that he had shared with Ron, Neville, Seamus, and Dean for the last six years.

Getting out of his four-poster bed with some regret, he got dressed and walked to the stairs down to the common room. It was completely empty, with no sign whatsoever of habitation; even the fire in the fireplace was out. Puzzled and slightly worried, Harry began stretching to relieve some of the muscle pains and aches that he had for some reason that he couldn't remember.

Still, there were spots on his body that felt very painful and sore, that, no matter how much he stretched, didn't disappear. Probing one of them on his back with his fingers, he felt, with a small measure of horror, that his robe was warm and wet in those places, and his finger came back covered with blood.

Running back upstairs to his dormitory, Harry pulled off his robe and looked at his back in a mirror. He could clearly see several deep cuts across his back and legs but as he watched, thunderstruck, he could see them knitting back together one by one, until the only evidence that they had been there was rivulets of drying and dried blood on his back, which also disappeared in short order.

Putting on some fresh robes, Harry left the dormitory and headed out of Gryffindor Tower walking towards the Great Hall, his footsteps echoing, wondering what the heck was going on and where everybody was.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Ron and Hermione looked at Harry's still form lying on the bed in the private ward as the team of Healers worked frantically on him, barely hearing the Healer's words, even though she was right next to them. "We thought that he'd be safer in here, of course, with nobody else around. We're trying to keep this quiet. Only the most essential personnel know that he's even here, and we've put Memory Charms on the people in the waiting room, although we did have to inform the Ministry. We shouldn't have any over-ambitious Death Eaters trying to come in and finish him off." Looking over the two of them, she frowned and said, "Ms. Granger are you aware that you're still bleeding? And Mr. Weasley, you should have that burn looked at."

And, indeed, they were quite a mess. Actually, it was a not so minor miracle that they were both still standing, considering their current conditions. Motioning over two Healer orderlies, she silently indicated Ron and Hermione, who seemed rooted to the spot, watching a Healer as he tried to heal Harry's wounds, his brow knitted with concentration as he used a combination of spells and potions to get some of the deeper lesions to heal.

"Ms. Granger, Mr. Weasley, please, you require attention. Please, go and get fixed up. We'll inform you as soon as there's any change in Mr. Potter." When they obviously hadn't heard her, she continued, a definite note of irritation in her voice, "Ms. Granger, Mr. Weasley, please! You can't do anything for Mr. Potter right now. You have both sustained serious injuries and you need medical attention! Please, go and at least get those looked at. We'll let you know as soon as he's stable." After her third, and most definitely final, request, Ron and Hermione seemed to register that that they were being talked to, and allowed themselves to be lead away for treatment.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Harry was running through the halls of Hogwarts, chasing after someone, his footfalls ringing loudly in the empty corridor. Harry had been walking slowly through the empty castle, trying to find someone, anyone, that could explain what was happening. But it had seemed like he was the only one in the entire castle.

The Great Hall? Empty. The Library? Empty. The classrooms? All empty. The Hospital Wing? Empty. Even the teachers' offices were unoccupied. For a while, Harry had wondered if everyone was home for some holiday or other… but wait…, last thing he could recall, it had been the middle of December, and pausing by a window, he looked outside and it looked like the middle of spring. Could he have been out that long? But that still didn't explain where everyone was… Then he had suddenly realized, as he looked around his current corridor near Trelawney's room, that all of the paintings were empty. Walking over to one that usually held a group of nuns from the 15th century, he saw that the nuns were gone; their table and chairs were still there, along with their books and whatnot, the fireplace in the background was still there and moving, but the subjects of the painting were gone.

Looking around at all of the other paintings, he had realized they were all empty, totally abandoned. It had looked like he was the only one in the castle, alive, dead, or pigment.

Feeling rather frustrated, he had continued to walk down the corridor, and spotted a glimpse of the hem of a cloak whipping out of sight around the next corner.

Yelling, "Wait!" he began to chase after the mysterious cloaked figure, turning the corner and seeing the cloak again whipping out of sight further down the hall. And so the chase was on, Harry running down one corridor only to see the figure whip out sight around the next bend.

On and on the chase went, up one corridor and down the next, up staircases and down secret passages, on and on and on, for minutes upon hours it seemed, until Harry noticed that, after all this time, he wasn't even short of breath, and he had just run from the North Tower all the way to… where was he?

Stopping, Harry checked his landmarks. He was near the Great Hall, which, now that he thought about it, seemed to be the mysterious figure's destination. Dashing through a shortcut hidden behind a tapestry, Harry ran towards the Great Hall, hoping that he would actually beat that whipping cloak hem there. Bursting out of a corridor in the Entrance Hall, he ran towards the doors to the Great Hall; at the same time, the cloaked figure ran out of another corridor around the corner. They collided as they both tried to round the corner, knocking each other over sprawling. Harry was back on his feet in a moment; the figure, on the other hand, was tangled up in its cloak and was fighting to extricate itself.

Harry ran over to the figure. When he grabbed its shoulders, it stopped struggling, and seemed to look up at him through the hood covering its face. Harry, thinking rather uncomfortably of Dementors, reached up and pulled the hood back and gasped. It wasn't a Dementor in the slightest. It was…

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

"Hermione…"

Ron and Hermione, back from their medical treatment, looked up at the almost barely perceptible sound that Harry had just made. Harry was lying on the bed, dressed in a hospital gown, looking serene and healed.

According to the Healer that Healer Pomfrey had put in charge, Harry was in perfect health; they had managed to repair all of the damage inflicted by Voldemort's defenses and they were working on an antidote for the potion. The potion, however, at least the way it seemed to be in their analysis, wouldn't cause these symptoms. While he acknowledged that they might be missing something, when Ron and Hermione had pointed out that Harry was experiencing _these_ symptoms, he said there shouldn't be any reason why Harry was still unconscious.

However, when he'd tried to use _Enervate _on Harry to no effect, a rather worried and scared expression had crossed his face for a moment. He had excused himself rather hurriedly from the room, leaving Ron and Hermione alone with Harry, who had been utterly silent up until a moment previously.

"Ron, did you hear that?" Hermione asked.

"Yeah," Ron responded, looking at their comatose friend, "but why'd he say your name all of a sudden?"

"I don't know, but there's definitely something going on in there," she said, looking worried as she and Ron sat next to each other, Ron slowly stroking her hair as they continued their vigil.


	2. Chapter 2 8:30 PM

Chapter 2- 8:30 P.M.

"Hermione, what are you doing here? I thought that the castle was empty," Harry said, feeling rather shocked and confused as he helped the cloak-clad witch to her feet in the Hogwarts entrance hall, where they had just collided as he had just chased her down as she ran towards the Great Hall.

Hermione looked at him, and shook her head in a rather bemused way, setting her hair and hood swaying. "Harry, of course we're here. But I don't think you quite realize where here is, do you?" she said.

"Wha… what do you mean?" Harry said, feeling very confused and somewhat frustrated.

She smiled, a very mysterious smile, and lifted the hood of her cloak back up over her head. "Come," she said from behind the heavy fabric, "I am not allowed to say any more for now. Come with me and all will be made clear."

She turned and strode towards the doors to the Great Hall. Harry followed her, muttering to himself something along the lines of _everything being made clear being a first so far in his life_, but slightly more explicitly

Opening the doors, she walked in. Harry followed her as she walked the length of the Great Hall into the small room past the staff table where Harry had gone in his fourth year at the start of the Triwizard Tournament.

Harry gasped as he crossed the threshold into the room. Waiting inside were nine more cloaked and hooded figures, standing in a line in front of the fire, a line that Harry thought was eerily reminiscent of the Death Eater ring from Voldemort's rebirthing ceremony, particularly as Hermione, still in her cloak, took her place in the line.

Looking around the room, Harry noted that the paintings in the room were also empty of their occupants, but aside from that, the only difference between the room now and the last time he had been in here were the robed figures. Harry looked them over. Hermione was mid-way down the line, having filled in a gap that had been apparently waiting for her; the figures were of different heights and builds beneath their cloaks, all of whom seemed rather familiar to Harry for some reason that he couldn't place. Hoping he could finally get some answers, Harry took a deep breath to steady himself and turned to face the line.

"What's going on?" he asked. "You promised me answers, Hermione. So?" The figures, Hermione included, remained impassive. "Why are you standing there? What's happening to me, to us? Why is the school empty? Why are we here?" Nothing. The line of cloaked figures remained impassive. Harry's temper began to give way. He roared at them, "WHAT THE HELL…"

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

"…is going on?" Ron Weasley asked the Healer rather irritably, as he suddenly returned to Harry's ward, with another Healer in tow, almost literally. To his great surprise, the second Healer, a rather petite strawberry-blond in her early to mid-thirties, turned to him and said, rather sweetly, "We're testing a rather worrisome theory of Andrews', dear (Hermione bristled). May I examine that cup, please?"

Ron turned to face Hermione, a questioning look on his face. Hermione nodded yes slowly, obviously reluctant to bring someone else in on what was happening to Harry. Ron stood up from his chair and removed from his pocket what had once been the personal cup of Helga Hufflepuff herself and was now little more than a blasted piece of metal and handed it to the female Healer, whose name tag read L. Alexander.

She took it and paced around the room several times, examining it closely, using several spells on it that shone and sparkled different colors. Ron turned and looked quizzically at Hermione, but even she seemed mystified.

After about ten or fifteen minutes, Healer Alexander seemed to have finished her examination of the defunct Horcrux. Turning to the other Healer, she said softly, "Yes, Andrews, it seems that your theory was essentially correct," and at this statement, he seemed to be rather appalled, "this cup was booby-trapped."

At this, Ron and Hermione shot up from their chairs, both shouting, "WHAT?" After a few moments making assorted incredulous sounds, they had both calmed down enough to feel embarrassment at not having considered that possibility themselves, as Ron dimly considered the fact that this was probably the first time that Hermione had been as surprised as he was, and at the same time. "Booby-trapped? In what way?" Hermione asked, sounding very worried.

"I'm not quite sure," said the older witch with a slightly distracted air as she continued to examine the cup closely. "All I could tell from those simple spells was that there was an entrapment spell of some sort placed upon this object, but as for the particulars, I can't really say just yet. I'll need to run more tests on this artifact, that is, if you two don't mind?"

"No, please, take it, find out what you can," Ron said, a definite note of panic in his voice.

Hermione knew what he was thinking without turning to look at him; that any sort of hex or trap that Voldemort would place on one of his possessions did not bode well for the victim. She cut in, "How long do you think it will take…?" her voice and face falling at the expression on the Healer's face.

"Hours, at the least," she said, now examining the base of the cup with her wand. "However, any information you could give me would be invaluable. It would be highly useful, for instance, to know whose object this was, its history, and what it was being used for," she added. "With that information, I could begin to narrow down possibilities and thus, tests that I would have to perform on it."

Ron and Hermione exchanged worried glances, and began to fill in, for what felt like the umpteenth time, Healer Alexander on the history of Tom Marvolo Riddle's quest for immortality.

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Harry stood in the small room off the Great Hall, glaring at the line of ten cloaked figures standing in front of him. He had been shouting at them for at least the last five minutes, demanding to know what was going on, asking question after question with no answer or even a response of any sort. He had, at this point, given up and was pacing back and forth, occasionally throwing nasty glances at the line. He didn't know why they weren't answering him, or who they were, or why Hermione had joined them, or even why she, in particular, wasn't answering his questions, which was, as far as he could recall, a first.

A (very) small part of his mind that wasn't angry noted that, although he had just been shouting at the top of his lungs for several minutes, he wasn't the slightest bit hoarse, indeed, his throat felt fine… just like before, he had been running flat out and hadn't even grown tired… something very odd was going on here… and he wasn't getting anywhere in unraveling it by being angry…

Calming himself down by an act of will, Harry decided to continue questioning them. Maybe, just maybe, he'd get an answer from these mysterious cloaked figures… _and Percy Weasley might just join the circus and become a clown, too,_ sniped his temper snidely from one corner of his mind. Still, it wasn't like he had anything to lose.

"What's going on here?"

Nothing. Dang, but he'd tried that one already, so he wasn't expecting that to work. Maybe questioning the particulars…

"Where is everybody else?"

Nothing.

"Why are all of the paintings empty?"

No response.

"Why are you standing there in those robes for?"

The only movement in the room came from the fire in the fireplace and from Harry himself.

"Why am I not tiring or going hoarse?"

Muggle still-life paintings would have been jealous of the reaction that the figures displayed.

"Why did I have to chase Hermione here?"

On and on and on Harry asked questions, his temper rising at each (non-)response. Finally, after minutes more of fruitless questioning, it broke, and he roared again, "WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? WHY AM I HERE? _WHO ARE YOU?"_

This final question seemed to be the one that they were waiting for. As one, each of the figures lifted its hands up and lowered its hood. Harry, caught completely flat-footed, stood dumbfounded as their faces came into view…

XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Utter silence reigned in Harry's private ward in St. Mungo's when Ron and Hermione had finished speaking. Healers Andrews and Alexander both seemed to be exhibiting varying degrees of shock, horror, and in Alexander's case, understanding.

Picking up the mangled remains of the cup from Harry's nightstand, where she had placed it during Ron and Hermione's discourse, she recommenced her examination of it.

As she turned it this way and that, she said, in a slightly distracted tone, "Thank you, that explains a lot of what I am seeing here…," as she cast another spell on it, then frowned as the light from the spell turned from silver to a blood-red, her expression quite clearly stating _Uh-Oh._

Ron and Hermione caught it, and then exchanged similar looks with each other, worried about what this might mean for Harry.

The Healer, any and all hints of distraction gone from her voice and posture, strode over to Harry's bedside and, tapping him lightly with her wand, muttered a series of incantations.

Hermione's jaw dropped, followed closely by Ron's. Hanging over the still form of their friend, suspended in mid-air, was a highly detailed, three-dimensional diagram of his body, showing a translucent view of Harry's torso and chest cavity, with lines leading away from his heart, brain, eyes, liver, lungs, and other essential organs to graphs showing their functions, complete with auditory cues.

Turning to the two of them, she saw their expressions and laughed lightly. "My mum's a Muggle A&E surgeon in Dublin. I got the idea for this," indicating the image in the air, "when I went to go and visit her a couple of years ago, from all of the monitoring equipment that they had around the place, and while we don't _usually _need this kind of thing, when we do, like now, this spell really comes in handy."

Looking back at the charts and graphs in-mid air, she pointed a few of them out to Ron and Hermione. "See that there?" indicating the lines leading away from the image's head "with the eye movements and the brain waves? Muggles call that R.E.M. sleep. He's dreaming. Hum… That's odd… there are two sets of brain waves in there, but one of them looks very faint… it might almost not be there…"

Coming out of her reverie, she turned back to the diagram of Harry and tapped it once with her wand. Looking back at Ron and Hermione, she said, "It's now set to record all of Mr. Potter's vital signs, so, hopefully, I'll have some more information to work with after I'm done going over this object," indicating the blasted piece of metal in her other hand, "and then we can hopefully figure out how to help Mr. Potter."

As she went out the door, she turned and said, "I will probably be back within the hour, two at the most. Come Andrews, I'm going to need your assistance for this."

After the Healers left the ward, Ron and Hermione sat down on the comfy chairs to wait for their return. Resting their heads on each other's shoulders, Ron began stroking her hair as they fought falling asleep to the sound of Harry's heartbeat as it came through the monitoring spell. _Lub-dub…lub-dub…lub-dub…lub-dub… lub-dub… _with each beat marking the graph in mid-air with a pattern of hills and valleys, etched in green. _Lub-dub…lub-dub… lub-dub… lub-dub…lub-dub… lub-dub…_

After several minutes of listening to the rhythmic and soothing sound of their friend's heart, Ron turned his head and softly said into Hermione's ear, as though not to wake their sleeping friend, "Hermione, what's an A&E?"

She smirked and started explaining to Ron about Muggle hospitals, trying not to laugh at the incredulous expression on his face as Harry's heartbeat continued its metronome-like rhythm in the background.


	3. Chapter 3 9:15 PM

Chapter 3- 9:15 P.M.

Harry gaped as the faces of his friends and confidants came into view from beneath the lowering hoods. His eyes darted from one face to the next. Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Luna, Neville, Lupin, Fred, George, and…

Harry felt the color drain from his face. "You're dead! I saw you die! Both of you! You're both dead!" Harry felt his knees weaken and buckle, and would have fallen onto the floor if not for the figures- his friends- rushing forward and catching him, as Harry stared at the last two figures in line. Both of them were wearing cheerful expressions as they supported him along with the others from falling at the sight of the two of them standing before him, his godfather and the Hufflepuff Triwizard Champion, Sirius Black and Cedric Diggory, in perfect health and good humor.

"How… How is this possible…?" Harry mumbled as they gently lowered him to ground, his vision going blurry from shock. He heard Ron's voice coming from his right side, "Easy, mate, easy." Hermione was taking charge, telling the others to prop his head up. He felt something soft under his head, and heard her telling someone to go and get a cup of water, then footsteps walking away and a few moments later returning, presumably with a goblet full of water. A few moments later, Harry felt the rim of the goblet at his lips, coupled with Ginny's voice telling him to drink.

As the water flowed down his throat, the room swam back into focus, leaving him looking up at a crowd of his closest friends with concerned looks on their faces.

"Alright there, Harry?" Ginny asked, helping him to a sitting position. Harry shook his head to rid himself of the stars before his eyes, and said, "I'm all right. Just give me a moment…" After steadying himself, he looked up at Cedric and Sirius, and said, "You're not really here, are you? None of you are…"

Sirius smiled, eyes twinkling, and said to Harry, "Do you think the dead that you love ever truly leave you? Do you think that you don't recall us more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? We are alive in you, Harry, and we show ourselves when you truly need us."

It took Harry a few moments to realize why that sounded so familiar. Feeling distinctly flat-footed, he asked, "How did you know what Dumbledore said to me after you escaped on Buckbeak?"

This time it was Cedric's turn to smile. Tossing a book to Harry, he said, "Found this in the library. Absolutely fascinating reading. Check page 427."

Harry did so and collapsed again. There, written down word for word, was his conversation with Dumbledore after Sirius had escaped. Ginny caught his head as he fell back again, with the book landing on his face and sliding off onto the floor. Fred and George chuckled. Getting back to a sitting position again with Ginny's help after a few moments and several reassurances that he was alright, Harry shook his head again, like a dog shaking off water, but more to clear the cobwebs rapidly wrapping around his brain.

He then picked up the purple-and-green bound book and examined the cover, hoping that it would clear things up a little. Instead of a title, as he had expected, he found a series of headings written in gold:

_Third Year…_

_Dumbledore…_

_Sirius…_

_Patronus…_

_Prongs…_

_Pettigrew…_

_Life Debt…_

_Trelawney…_

_Prophecy…_

_Buckbeak…_

And so on, in three columns of medium-sized type packed over the front cover, was every topic contained in this book.

Getting to his feet with a grunt and Ginny's assistance, he handed the book over to Sirius, who pocketed it in his cloak. Harry, feeling steadier by the second, asked, "But how is this possible? You and you," indicating Sirius and Cedric, "standing there, when I saw you both die in front of me…"

Then it suddenly hit him. _Alive in you, _Sirius had said moments before… Horcruxes preserving a piece of someone's soul…

"Sirius, Cedric, this is some sort of dream, isn't it?" His heart soared when they both nodded yes. "And you two are here, in this dream, so this is the only way that the two of you could talk to me, because I couldn't see you when I was awake…"

_Oh, god. _Harry thought, _Have they been trapped in literally the back of my mind for all of this time since they died… Have I been carrying around pieces of their souls since they died? Can I help them? How could they… Rather, how DID they make the jump in here? Was it something about that arch or Voldemort's _Avada Kedavra _curse…_

He nearly jumped out of his skin, and most certainly his horrified reverie, when Hermione spoke up from behind him.

"I'm so sorry to say this, Harry, but you're wrong about that idea. Well, half wrong," as the bottom of his stomach dropped out from under him. "Cedric and Sirius aren't really here, nor are they really Cedric Diggory or Sirius Black. But then again, none of us are really here or who we appear to be. We're aspects of you, your mind. I'm your intelligence…"

"You're WHAT?" Harry said, incredulous and astonished.

"Aspects of you, facets of your personality, mental representations of parts of your mind," Hermione said patiently.

Ron looked up at Harry and said, "I'm your sense of loyalty."

Hermione continued, "Ginny is your ability to love. She's probably the strongest one here…" _Too right she is, _Harry thought, as the Ginny-aspect in question caught him in a bone-crushing hug. "Ah, Ginny, Ginny, please be careful, love… my ribs!" Harry said, only half-joking. She grinned and loosened her grip fractionally as Harry felt relieved, somewhat, that he had been wrong moments before.

"…Sirius is your impulsiveness…" Harry smirked. _How appropriate…_

"…Luna is your sense of skepticism and suspicion…" Harry experienced severe abdominal pain from laughing at the irony, especially when the Hermione-aspect arched her eyebrow, obviously amused.

"…Remus here," she continued, indicating Lupin, "is your determination…"

"…the twins are, rather obviously, your mischievousness and sense of humor…" as the two of them removed about a dozen small objects from their pockets and began juggling them between themselves.

"…Neville is your humility…"

"…and I'm your sense of respect," finished Cedric.

Harry looked around at all of them, feeling both surprise and happiness, along with a small amount of foreboding. _This is going to take some getting used to…_

"Wait a tick," Harry turned around to face the Hermione-aspect. "Hermione, you said I was half right. How was I half right if these two, if all of you, are really just aspects of my personality?"

His sense of foreboding growing with each nervous glance that was being thrown among the images of his friends, Hermione started, somewhat cautiously, "Well, Harry, you thought that you were in a dream of some sort, and that you had someone else inside your mind aside from yourself."

"Well?" Harry prompted, his apprehension feeling absolutely overwhelming.

"You're in a coma, Harry," Sirius said bluntly.

Harry's knees nearly gave out from under him again; if Ginny hadn't still been holding him, he probably would have ended up back on the floor.

As Harry steadied himself on Ginny's shoulder, Fred and George cut in; both of them had stopped their juggling and looked deadly serious. "And you've got an uninvited guest in here, too, mate," said George.

Harry asked very quietly, "Who is it?" fearing he already knew the answer.

No one answered him. Looking down at Ginny in her black cloak, still holding on to him as if welded, he asked, ever so softly, "Who is it, Gin?"

She looked up from her current view of his chest and met his gaze. Then she said it.

"It's Tom, Harry. It's Tom."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Ron and Hermione had spent the last several minutes watching the readouts hanging in midair over Harry's body with increasing levels of anxiety. For the better part of an hour after Healer Alexander had cast the monitoring spell, everything had been fine; the two of them had had to fight falling asleep from the slow and regular tempo of Harry's heartbeat and the comfy chairs.

Then, several minutes ago, the floating spell display had started screeching at them, flashing blue, clearly trying to get their attention as Harry's vital signs went haywire. Jumping to their feet, Ron and Hermione had yelled for a Healer, any Healer, and watched in horror as Harry's heartbeat had imitated a drum roll.

Healer Andrews had gotten back to the ward within moments, but the incident was fading rapidly, and Harry's heart and lungs had returned to their regular pace within a minute or two and stayed there. For a few minutes.

Then the display went insane again, as Harry's heart rate, breathing and a variety of other functions proceeded to scatter all over the map. Andrews almost panicked, but before he could do anything, Harry's vital signs returned to normal, the entire incident having lasted only heartbeats. Ron and Hermione's heartbeats that is; Harry's heart had been busy setting a tempo more suitable for a rock concert.

Now the three of them were watching the floating displays intently; so intently, in fact, that they nearly missed hearing Harry softly say, "Ginny," at a volume that was barely louder than his normal breathing, so soft it was almost a sigh, an exhalation, notable only for the change in sound from the regular, easily overlooked, ignored, missed.

But they didn't miss it.

Ron looked up, startled, and caught Hermione's gaze.

"Did he just say…?"

"…Your sister's name?" I think so," Hermione said.

They looked down to see a change on Harry's face for the first time in hours. He was smiling. They stood there for a few seconds, slightly stunned.

Ron spoke up first. "Well, that proves it. The prat's defiantly dreaming. I don't know whether to hug him for still being alive after all of that or hex him for dreaming about my sister. Think he's snogging in there?" he said, a relieved look on his face, coupled with a knowing grin.

"No, I don't think so, Ron… Look!" she said, pointing to the display, which had gone crazy again; at the same time, the smile on Harry's face disappeared as if someone had flicked a switch.

Within moments, the readouts were back to normal. Unfortunately, so was Harry's face, without a smile or a frown marring his features, completely and totally blank.

Ron and Hermione both looked up from Harry's face at the same moment, exchanging panicked glances, until Healer Andrews, largely ignored at the back of the room, coughed lightly to get their attention. It worked, as the two of them nearly jumped out of their skins at the sound.

"Uh, Mr. Weasley, it occurs to me that, um, considering the, um, current situation with Mr. Potter and what just occurred…"

Ron glared at him. _We don't have time for this. _"Spit it out," he said to the nervous Healer.

"Well, with what just happened, with Mr. Potter mentioning your sister's name and then reacting like that, well in a case like this, she might have some sort of insight to offer us that might help us…"

"No. She's not coming here and seeing him like… like this!" Ron said, indicating Harry laid out on the bed. "I'm not going to let her see Harry like this! She doesn't need it! And she's in enough pain as it is!"

"Ron, please, consider what she would do to you if she heard you say that," Hermione interjected, smiling very slightly.

Ron stopped in the middle of his diatribe, looking as if he had been hit with something very heavy in the face, visions of flying bogeys, facial boils, unreachable itching, and the results of an assortment of other hexes undoubtedly very vivid in his mind.

Hermione continued in a very even and reasonable tone, "And if she ever found out about this, and that she could have helped, but we wouldn't let her know about it, she'd feel terrible. Then she'd make us feel worse than her, or have you forgotten how many hexes Harry taught her?"

Ron started sputtering. "But she's my sister!"

"And she loves Harry."

And with that parting shot, Hermione settled back into her chair, watching Ron's face, knowing what he was thinking. His sister's anguish or possibly his best mate's life? She knew what the answer was going to be, and when he reached it; Ron sat back down in his chair and held his head in his hands. He said, from in-between his palms, to Andrews, "She'll be at the Burrow on winter holiday from Hogwarts."

The Healer said, "I'll go and get her right away," and got up from his chair and strode to the door. He stopped and said softly to Ron, "Thank you."

After the door closed behind him, Hermione reached over and patted Ron's back. "You did the right thing, Ron."

He groaned into his palms. "Mum's going to kill me."

XXXXXXXXXXX

_A/N: I hope you are enjoying the plot so far and remember-reviews are always greatly appreciated! nudgenudge_


	4. Chapter 4 10:00 PM

Chapter 4- 10:00 P.M.

Even though Harry had been expecting it, fearing it really, for him to hear that Voldemort had invaded his mind made him feel sick, unclean. He felt like he had two years previously, after eavesdropping on the elder members of the Order at St. Mungo's, when Moody had uttered those fateful words. He had been wrong in his assumptions then, of course. Harry had had absolutely no inkling of what it had meant to be possessed by Voldemort, at least not until the battle at the Ministry. The memory of that, the pain, the sensations, stirred in Harry's mind and he realized…

"This isn't the way he possessed me last time, at the Ministry…" Harry muttered quietly to himself, or so he thought.

"No, Harry, it isn't."

Harry looked up at the voice that had spoken. It was the Hermione-aspect. But how had she heard him…?

_Oh, that's right; they're a part of me, extensions of my personality. Talking to myself has just been redefined in a rather impressive way._ He smiled painfully.

"This is _really _going to take some getting used to…" he said.

Lupin broke in, clearly wanting to keep Harry on track. "Yes it will, Harry, but please, think about what you just said. You're quite right, this isn't the same way he possessed you last time. Now why would that be? Think! What was your last memory before waking up here?"

Concentrating, thinking back, Harry remembered flashes, scenes:

_A magical repository. A basin full of potion. Drinking the poisonous potion. A cup at the bottom of the basin. Fighting their way out of the repository. Apparating to 12 Grimmauld Place. Destroying the cup. A flash, silence and blackness._

"The Horcrux," Harry said. "It was the Horcrux. Riddle cast some sort of spell on it, didn't he?"

Hermione spoke up. "He did. You see, the way he possessed you at the Ministry was crude, awkward. It was possible for you to throw him out of your body, as you did that time. No, this, this is much more elegant. The combination of that potion, which weakened your mind and body, and a highly complex charm on the cup enabled him to make the jump from the Horcrux to your body, traveling back along the very spell you had cast to destroy it. And now he's here, and you have to fight him directly."

"So how do I fight him?" _Wait a moment here…_ "Hang on. How did you know all that, about the spell and the potion and how he got here? If you're part of me, I should have known that before for you to be able to tell me, but I didn't know about any of that. How could I have?" Harry said, eyes narrowed suspiciously.

He had expected the lot of them to have looked rather shifty when he had said that. Instead, they all looked extremely pleased with him. Cedric spoke first.

"Very good, Harry. We knew that you could figure it out," he said, beaming.

Harry, trying to get past the feeling of being caught completely flat-footed _again_, coughed, and, extricating himself from Ginny's embrace, went and sat down in one of the armchairs by the fire and waited for a few moments as everyone else did likewise.

When they were all seated, Harry said, in a tone as flat as paper, "Explain."

"The spell that Voldemort used was an ancient piece of magic used to protect the caster from death as a last resort," Hermione began. "When attacked by magic or weaponry that would fatally harm the caster, the caster's soul would be transferred to his attacker's mind, where they would then fight over the control of the body. Voldemort managed to modify the spell to protect his Horcruxes by using a potion that would weaken your resistance to the invasion of your mind by his diminished soul. The key to the spell, actually, is that the caster would have to be physically harmed for it to work, so when you blasted the cup, you activated the spell. Actually, that requirement was the primary reason that _Avada Kedavra _was developed in the first place, since it simply wipes away a person's life and soul, doing no physical damage in the process."

Harry, who had been massaging his temples with his fingertips to fight a headache he felt coming on, looked up and said, "But that still doesn't explain _how _you know all of that."

"I'm coming to that, Harry," Hermione said. "You see, another effect of the spell was that the attacker's mind- your mind, Harry - would fragment under the assault. Your mind would split along the lines of different facets of the mind, with the primary personality fragment retaining its memories and the personality of the person, with the rest of the fragments assuming the mental images of significant people in the person's life. Those other fragments," as she indicated the others seated around the fire, "would be bound by rules from the enchantment; however, they would also receive information concerning the enchantment that they could pass on to the primary personality fragment, provided that it could ask the correct questions."

Harry groaned. "So why didn't you answer my questions from before?" he asked grumpily.

This time Ron spoke up, "Believe us, mate, we wanted to, but we couldn't until you asked us who we were, which is the question that we were required to answer first before we could do anything to help you. Actually, the only thing that we were allowed to do at that point was lure you here in the first place, when you chased down Hermione."

Feeling rather irritable at this, Harry sank further into his chair.

"So? Are there any other rules that I should know about or any other information that would be helpful to know?" he asked crossly, deliberately phrasing his question as ambiguously as possible.

There were anxious glances all around him. Finally, one of the twins spoke up.

"Well, as for rules at this point, it's pretty much anything goes, except for that we can't be the ones to kill him."

Harry shot out of his chair at this. "WHAT?" he shouted.

George winced and then continued where he, or maybe his brother, had left off.

"Well, you are the one who has to kill him in here. The only things we can do are assisting you or try to keep him from killing us, but you're the one who has to land the killing blow, Harry."

Neville spoke up, "and there's also no magic in here. We may have our wands, and he his, but charms, hexes, curses, and spells don't work in here, so they're really nothing more than thin strips of wood."

Ginny interjected, "Potions will work, and so will broomsticks and other magical items, just no wandwork allowed in here."

"And? Is there anything else?" Harry asked, feeling oddly relieved. _At least I don't have to worry about being hit with the Unforgivable Curses inside my own skull._

Hermione looked mildly uncomfortable.

"Well, there is one thing, Harry," she said. "This castle is a metaphor for your mind, with different areas corresponding to different parts of your mind. The library represents your memory, for instance, the same way we represent aspects of your personality. But there are two things here that aren't metaphors – you and Voldemort. If he kills any of us before you get him, there's no problem. When you come out of the coma, you'll still have your personality intact. But if he manages to kill you, the prime fragment…"

"Game over," said Sirius.

"And then Tom will have a brand new body to wear, and the last hope of the wizarding world will be gone," Ginny said.

XXXXXXXXXXX

Ron had been on his way back from the loo, had been about to grasp the doorknob to Harry's ward, when it happened.

"RONALD BILIUS WEASLEY!"

Ron almost hit the ceiling in shock. Marching in his direction down the hall, fury etched in every feature and step, was Mrs. Weasley, followed closely by Mr. Weasley and Ginny, both of whom looked worried, although Ginny's face had a definite note of amusement on it. Walking almost unnoticed behind them was Healer Andrews, looking extremely cowed.

"…OUT OF MY MIND WITH WORRY… CLOCK HAND ON HOSPITAL… NOT A WORD OR A NOTE FOR HOURS…"

"Mum, please," Ron said quietly. She didn't hear him.

"…A HEALER APPARATING INTO THE BURROW IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT WITHOUT ANY WARNING… NEARLY HEXED HIM… NO EXPLAINATION AT ALL, JUST TOLD US TO COME AND BRING GINNY WITH US… SAID IT WAS AN EMERGENCY…"

Ron carefully took hold of the doorknob behind his back and pushed opened the door to Harry's ward.

"…SEEING YOU STANDING THERE, IN PERFECT HEALTH; YOU HAD BETTER HAVE A GOOD…"

Mrs. Weasley's voice trailed off. She had clearly spotted the still form lying on the bed in the small room. She then looked up at Ron, obviously dreading his response. Ron nodded, slowly and painfully, feeling like he had ground glass in-between the joints in his neck. He didn't have time to elaborate, though, before a very dismayed, and very feminine, gasp was heard coming from behind Mr. Weasley. His father had just reached the open door, worry clearly etched on his face at whatever could be horrible enough to stop one of his wife's angry rants dead in its tracks, when something redheaded and petite pushed past he and Ron both and ran into the room, going right to Harry's bedside.

After several moments of examining Harry's blank face, and softly pleading with him to tell her what was wrong, to wake up, she turned and faced her brother.

"Ron, what happened to him?" Ginny asked, barely holding back tears by sheer force of will.

Gesturing mutely because he didn't trust his own voice, Ron indicated to his parents that they should enter the room. After they and Healer Andrews came inside, Ron turned and shut the door behind him.

"Ron, what happened to Harry?" Ginny repeated.

Ron looked at his sister's face and saw that all of the anger that had been directed at Harry for making her stay behind, somewhat safe, for leaving her to cry herself to sleep each night since they had left, had disappeared, replaced by the love that had been pushed behind that anger for the last six months- _what was I thinking, that I wasn't going to let her know about this…-_ and joined by new emotions; fear for Harry, lying in this bed from some unknown cause, and …

Before he was able to identify the other emotions etched on his sister's face, the door swung back open, whacking him on the side of his upper thigh with the doorknob and his shoulder with the door edge. Ron nearly cursed out loud at the pain; he restrained himself with difficulty, not daring to do so with his mother in the room. Instead he watched the person who had just entered the ward, desperately wanting to throttle said person, until he realized who it was.

Healer Alexander was back, and in a right state, too. Clearly restraining panic by the thinnest of margins, she ran over to Harry's bedside, ignoring Ginny, and began rewinding half of the graphs recording above his head with her wand. As they were rewinding at a hundred times normal speed, she began to cast a half dozen or so spells on Harry's head. The sparkles from one spell barely had time to change color before she cast the next one, and each seemed to point towards her worst fears, if her expression was anything to go by. Then she turned her attention to the graphs of Harry's brain functions over the past two hours. What she saw there must have confirmed what she had found out from the cup, because her expression deepened to one of utmost horror.

It was only at this point that she realized there were other people in the room who had been waiting quietly for her to finish and share her prognosis. She somehow managed to school her features back into the medical professional expression of quiet confidence and cheer, but it was too late- the damage had already been done. Still, everyone was apparently waiting for her to drop the other shoe.

She did.

"I found the spell that You-Know-Who used," she said, briskly. "It's a very old spell, hasn't been used in centuries, but it…" She then proceeded to tell the four Weasleys, Hermione and Healer Andrews about the residue from the soul transference spell she had found on the cup and how she thought the potion had been used to modify it.

She then continued, "And see here?" indicating the graphs. "There are two sets of brain wave patterns, one relatively constant, the other weak and growing stronger over time. So You-Know-Who is in there," pointing to Harry's skull, "and they're fighting it out over his body."

The only sounds in the ward after she was finished were Harry's heartbeat and breathing. Then, as one, Molly, Arthur and Ginny turned towards Ron and Hermione, who were sitting next to each other. Ginny spoke up first.

"Ron, Hermione, I think the two of you had better start from the beginning."

_A/N: And now the stage is set..._


	5. Chapter 5 10:35 PM

Chapter 5 – 10:35 P.M.

Hands clasped behind his back, Harry was pacing back and forth in the small room off of the Great Hall, and was currently in danger of wearing a rut in the floor. He knew that this was going to be one of his most dangerous battles, and that, as much as he would have liked to have started running through the castle looking for Voldemort, he would need to be as prepared and informed as possible. _Besides_, he thought, _he can come to me, for once._

Finally getting straight answers to his questions was nice. His various fragments had been busy answering them, no matter how small a detail was concerned. He had so far learned that, so far as this little mental universe was concerned, only the Hogwarts castle and grounds existed, but not Hogsmead, so he could only go up to the edge of the grounds before he would encounter a barrier; that a Legilimens would be unable to penetrate the spell; that, even though it was a coma-dream, this was still Hogwarts: no Apparating allowed and many other details besides.

Harry was in the midst of trying to think of questions that he hadn't asked yet, of new details and new angles, when he heard the noise.

He froze, not sure whether it was real or not, a soft bubbling and hissing sound, skirting the edge of audibility…

"Harry?" Luna asked with a questioning look that was decidedly unusual and out-of-place on her face, although it could have just been that she was wearing a black cloak and lacked her usual necklace of butterbeer bottle caps. "Is there something wrong?"

Harry held up his hand with his index finger extended in the universal _one moment_ expression, and listened, with all his might, concentrating on that elusive sound… it seemed to be coming from the door… Then he remembered Ginny saying, _Potions will work…_

"GET DOWN!" he roared and, without questions of any sort, everyone hit the floor, moments before the door exploded inward in a shower of splinters.

Harry heard pieces of the door whizzing by just inches over his head and looked towards the recently-vacated doorframe as Voldemort strode into the room.

Harry jumped to his feet, not wanting to be caught in a vulnerable position. He heard everyone else doing likewise behind him and decided to try and stall for time, like he had that time in the Hall of Prophecy.

"Hello, Tom," Harry said, hoping that using that name would irritate him. He remembered from Quidditch that angry people didn't think too clearly, and, frankly, he admitted to himself, he needed all of the advantages he could get. He rapidly began considering his options.

It worked. Eyes narrowed, the piece of the soul of Tom Marvolo Riddle said in an annoyed tone, "That is not my name, and I know that you know that, Potter."

Forcing a smile, Harry retorted, thinking quickly, "But since you know my name, I assume that that you've been looking around in my memory, so then you also know that I've escaped _Lord Voldemort_ four times, and I have to say it, but you're not him." And he wasn't. His features were no longer those of Tom Riddle from the diary, or even Hokey's memory, but they were not so far gone as the version from Dumbledore's memory, coming to apply for the Defense Against the Dark Arts job.

Meanwhile, Harry had overviewed the situation. Two Words: Not Good. Voldemort was standing by the door, which was the only entrance- or exit- to the room. They were too far away to effectively rush him in the cloaks most of them were wearing and, while his wand might not work in here, Harry didn't want to underestimate whatever else he might be packing.

"Oh, but I am, Potter, and when I kill you and take your body, then there will be _two _of me, and I am sure that my older self will be quite interested in your memories; particularly one of a certain prophecy…" he replied, an evil smile on his face.

Harry's insides froze, but he made himself keep talking, buying time. "Brave talk from someone outnumbered eleven to one," he said. Harry eyed Voldemort's lumpy robes and remembered the explosion that blew in the door.

_Potions, then, _he told himself. But how to deal with them…? Wait, there, on the floor, was a substantial piece of the door, just a few feet away. Maybe he could kick it, distract Voldemort, or hit him with it… Harry carefully shifted his posture slowly to his right.

"Ah, yes, your splinters. But, really, Potter," Voldemort said, in an amused, but evil tone, "do you think I failed to anticipate that? I did, after all, cast the spell in the first place. And, of course, I came prepared."

Feeling sweat break out on his forehead, Harry kept speaking, knowing that every moment he gained helped. "Prepared how?" Harry shifted a little further to the right. _Just a few more inches…Keep him talking…_

Voldemort smiled, and said, "To kill you, of course," and, almost quicker than the eye could see, reached inside his robes, pulled out a small sealed vial and threw it down on the ground. It exploded in a cloud of greenish gas, completely shielding him from view and filling the room.

As the potion-cloud spread quickly through the room, Harry felt like his lungs were on fire, his eyes streaming tears. Staggering towards the door, he tried yelling, "RUN!" but instead fell over onto his hands and knees, coughing. He couldn't see through the billowing fumes for more than a foot or two. Harry began crawling towards where he thought the door was when a foot came out of nowhere and kicked him hard in the ribs, flipping him over onto his back.

"Hello again, Potter," Voldemort said, standing over him, obviously having taken an antidote to the noxious green gas. He produced another vial from within his robes, and, obviously savoring the moment, made to throw it on Harry's face.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

"…And that's when you three arrived so I don't need to reiterate what Healer Alexander said," Hermione said as she finished her recitation of the evening's events to the Weasleys. Molly and Arthur were shocked speechless, their eyes darting between Harry, the monitoring spell, and Hermione. And Ginny? Ginny was…

"RON! WHEN WERE YOU PLANNING ON TELLING ME ABOUT THIS!" Ginny shouted at her brother, her eyes moist with unshed tears, but lit from within by a burning fire.

…upset.

Hermione shot Ron a look that quite clearly said, _I told you so._

Ginny caught it and yanked out her wand, pointing it in Ron's direction, who gulped and followed its point nervously with his eyes. She continued, still in a fury, "So, if Hermione hadn't convinced you, would you have even told me! I am not a CHILD! YOU DON'T NEED TO _PROTECT_ ME! I SHOULD HEX YOU RIGHT NOW!"

Drawing back, Ron cowered from the temper in front of him that was so like his mother's. Before Ginny could follow through on her threat, however, the door to the ward swung open to readmit into the ward Healers Pomfrey, Andrews and Alexander, who were conversing with…

Rufus Scrimgeour strode into the small ward, followed by a series of familiar faces in his small entourage, which consisted of Dolores Umbridge (Ron, Hermione and Ginny all scowled), Percy (Ron and Ginny both fingered their wands, obviously debating which hexes to use), and his pet Auror, Dawlish.

"Arthur, Molly," the Minister acknowledged them with a nod, and continued, "and this must be Hermione (behind him Umbridge glowered, obviously remembering her last trip into the Forbidden Forest), and these two are Ronald and Ginevra, if I recall correctly."

The three of them didn't buy his sweet tone. In a voice acidic enough to etch glass, Hermione said, "Why are you here, Minister? Harry turned down your requests to be the Ministry's new poster boy and, at any rate, he isn't exactly in any condition to talk with you at the moment."

Scrimgeour dropped the facade in an instant. "Ms. Granger, might I remind you as to whom you are talking to," he said in a tone that had several things in common with polar glaciers.

Ginny jumped in, her eyes still full of the fury from moments before. "Minister, we're not stupid, so don't treat us like we are. You came here because they," she indicated the Healers clustered in the corner, "told you what happened to Harry, and now you want to kill him to get rid of an annoyance and a piece of Voldemort (everybody except for Ron and Hermione winced) at the same time, or arrest him so you can interrogate that piece if it wins," she said, obviously torn between bursting into tears and hexing the four of them into oblivion.

Scrimgeour, looking at Ginny with a distinctly livid expression, said, with barely restrained vehemence, "I do not need to explain myself to underage witches who have no concept of what is going on and the measures that are required. Dawlish!" he ordered, "You know what to do!" Dawlish gave a curt nod in acknowledgement and began walking towards Harry's bed, hand reaching down to his pocket.

"_STUPEFY!"_

"_EXPELLIARMUS!"_

"_IMPEDIMENTA!"_

Dawlish hadn't even gotten the wand out of his pocket before Ron, Hermione and Ginny simultaneously hit him. For a moment, he had been eerily lit by a red glow from the three spells, his wand flying up in the air (Ginny, smirking, caught it), then he just stood there for a few seconds, swaying. Then he fell face-first onto the floor with a crunch that quite clearly indicated that he was going to need to have _episkey_ cast on him in the near future. Perhaps if he was lucky his face wouldn't be worse off than Harry's had been on the Hogwarts Express when Malfoy had broken his nose.

Before he landed, Ron, Hermione and Ginny had swung to cover Scrimgeour, Umbridge, and Percy with their wands.

"I don't know about you, Minister, but that felt like a required measure to me," Ginny said to him, her wand now pointing directly at his face.

"Silly girl, do you have any idea what you've just done?" Umbridge asked in her sickly sweet, poisoned honey voice.

"Yeah," Ron said coldly, "We just kept you from making a mistake that we'd all pay for. Hands away from the pockets, Percy. Don't give me an excuse, 'cause I'll take it." Percy jerked his right hand away from his pocket.

"That goes for you too, Umbridge" said Hermione, a smirk on her face, as she kept her wand on the squat Undersecretary.

Scrimgeour, eyeing Ginny's wand in much the same way that Ron had been mere moments earlier, said to Mr. Weasley, "Arthur, call off your children!"

Mr. Weasley, who had been sitting in his chair, stony-faced, since Scrimgeour had entered the room, sighed and stood up, running his hand through his thinning red hair in an exhausted sort of way. Scrimgeour smiled and said, "Thank you, Arthur."

Ron's and Ginny's expressions were aghast at this seeming betrayal, particularly when their father said, "Alright, then, let's have it…," Scrimgeour and Umbridge both smiled, as did Arthur, when he finished, "…Percy."

Ron, Hermione, and Ginny all coughed to cover up their laughter, as Scrimgeour's eyes flared. "Arthur, how dare you…" and that was as far as he got before Mrs. Weasley joined the fray.

"How Dare Arthur! More How Dare You, Minister! If not for Harry here, You-Know-Who would have been back over five years ago! And when He did come back, you ignored and ridiculed the poor boy! Then you had the gall to ask for his help last year! And now you were going to arrest the only wizard that has ever dueled He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and survived, who is probably our best hope for surviving this whole war!"

All eyes were on Mr. and Mrs. Weasley and the Minister, who were currently glaring and continuing to shout at each other. Umbridge was counting on that as she stealthily slipped her hand down towards her wand. Unfortunately for her, it wasn't quite stealthily _enough._

"_Petrificus Totalus!"_

Umbridge stiffened from Hermione's spell, and fell over backwards onto the floor with a dull thud, ramrod straight. Ron and Ginny laughed again as Hermione looked down over the Minister's frozen toady and said, "I was hoping that you would give me a reason. Thanks. I enjoyed that." Umbridge's eyes were whirling around in her immobile face, conveying a sense of absolute fury.

At this point, Scrimgeour, realizing the seriousness of the situation that he was in- having three well-trained and rather displeased teenagers pointing wands in his direction and that he had just tried to have something rather negative done to their friend- burst out, "Well, what do you want us to do? It's not like we can do anything to help him. He's in a coma! He's in there and we're out here and there's nothing we can do about that!"

"Uh, Minister?"

Every head in the room that was capable of movement whipped around to face the three Healers standing quietly by the door. Even Healer Alexander looked genuinely surprised at herself for speaking up. Forcing an even expression, she said to the surprised room, "There may be a way for us to help him in there."


	6. Chapter 6 10:55 PM

Chapter 6- 10:55 P.M.

Time stood still. A heartbeat was a decade; a blink, two score, with a breath containing the birth and adolescence of nations. Harry was sprawled on the floor at Voldemort's feet for an eternity. The windup of the arm holding the vial took millennia. Stars condensed, grew old and died while Voldemort's eyes shone with triumph. Harry's knowledge that he was about to die, was going to die, had died already but was still breathing, that death was coming, lasted long enough for mountain ranges to be built up, worn away and built anew. The running charge of the dog took… _The dog?_

Sirius, in his Animagus form, barking madly, tackled Voldemort, sending the vial flying. Harry heard it shatter somewhere in the room, followed by an ominous sizzling sound, as time resumed its normal flow.

Tearing and ripping sounds were making their way to Harry's ears from somewhere in the room as Sirius did his best to keep Voldemort at bay, away from Harry, giving him time to recover. Harry heard Voldemort gasp in pain as Sirius growled through what sounded like a mouthful of forearm, as the massive black dog did his best to maul the dark wizard.

Harry, feeling incredibly light-headed and weak, paired with a fair amount of pain in his ribs from Voldemort's kick, managed to get to his feet and whirled through the green clouds, eager to help Sirius finish off Voldemort. Then he heard another shattering sound, a shout of triumph from Voldemort, and a yelp of pain from Sirius.

"Sirius? Sirius!"

Sirius must have transformed back into a human then, as Harry heard Sirius saying thickly, as if in absolute agony, "Take Harry and go! I'll… I'll hold him off for as long as I can…"

Harry stopped in his tracks at these words, his mind flashing back to similar words shouted in similar circumstances as he thought _no, no, NO! Not again! You can't do that to me…_ Then he felt strong hands suddenly grasp him on both sides as he heard the dog that was Sirius growling once again behind him. Harry fought against their grip as his fragments towed him, involuntarily, towards the door.

"Let me go! I need to help him, he can't die again!"

They emerged into the Great Hall, Harry struggling against Lupin, Cedric and the twins as they strained to hold him back, pulling him towards the door that led out of the Great Hall. Harry could hear assorted tearing, ripping, and smashing noises coming from the room as Sirius kept Voldemort at bay, dancing with death as he bought Harry time to escape.

"Let me go! Let me GO!"

"He's too strong, Harry. You can't fight him now, that potion weakened you too much. Sirius sacrificed himself so you could get away…"

Lupin's words were drowned out by a howl of pain and agony coming from the small room, a howl that could only have been produced in a throat that wasn't human. Harry felt his pain coursing through him, felt him go, the barrier in his mind between him and Sirius down for those few moments as the sounds of battle and destruction ceased, replaced by silence.

Harry stared at the shattered doorway feeling as if his heart would tear itself in two. _No, not Sirius… Not again…_

Harry heard the door open behind him as the twins manhandled him over the threshold into the entrance hall. When they let go of him, he just stood there, rooted to the spot.

"Harry, Run!" he heard them say, yell really, at him. But Harry didn't move as he stared, stunned, at the space where he had just lost his godfather for the second time.

Then Voldemort emerged from the billowing green smoke, looking bloody and weathered, but triumphant. Eyes flashing, he spotted them and, reaching into his robes again, produced another vial as he walked towards them, limping slightly.

"Harry, RUN! You're not strong enough to fight him now… HARRY! RUN!"

Barely registering Lupin's words, Harry ran.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

"And how are we supposed to do that?" Hermione asked the Healer.

Almost wilting under the combined stares of everyone in the room- well, everyone capable of moving as Dawlish and Umbridge were both still laid out on the floor and Harry being in a coma- Healer Alexander somehow managed to continue speaking.

"There is a way to enter the mind of someone in a coma and assist, but it's very uncommonly done and highly dangerous to do. We only use it when there's no other choice, such as now," she said.

"So? How do you do it?" Ginny demanded.

The strawberry-blond Healer took a deep breath and said in a measured rush, "Essentially, the person who will be going to assist the comatose person takes a specific potion that will put them in a coma and opens their mind, dropping a series of unconscious mental barriers. Then, before that person can start their own comatose dream, a group of Healers casts a series of spells that connects the two minds and harmonizes the coma-dream of the first comatose person with the second. The new person will find themselves in the first person's coma-dream and can assist in ending it."

Scrimgeour looked pleased at this. "Fine, then. When Dawlish is awake again," he said, with an irritated glance at the three teenagers, "he'll go under and help Mr. Potter end this whole sorry affair."

Healer Alexander looked mildly uncomfortable at Scrimgeour's statement. Hermione sympathized. _It must be hard to contradict someone who can have you fired and then blacklisted with a wave of his hand_, she thought and looked at the Minister's expression as Ginny kept her wand on him, _and he would enjoy doing it, too,_ she mentally added to herself.

However, although somewhat hesitantly, the petite brain and cognitive specialist Healer managed to say, "Pardon me, Minister, but that won't work."

Scrimgeour was obviously reaching the end of his tether from the up and down events of the previous few minutes. In a tone that made Hermione think of wild tigers being held behind rusting bars, he said, gritting his teeth, "And why not?"

Somehow the Healer kept her wits about her as she told the Minister, "Because, sir, connecting two minds under the best of circumstances is difficult. In a situation such as this, it helps if the two people concerned already have a close connection, someone they know and trust…"

Ginny cut in, "And Harry doesn't know Dawlish, and certainly doesn't trust him, or you, for that matter."

Alexander, acknowledging Ginny's statement with a nod, obviously happy that someone else had taken that pronouncement off of her shoulders, continued, "Which is another reason why this is so rarely done. It has to be a very close connection; a deep friendship or powerful and understanding love, a relationship where both would be willing to risk their own life for the other. Which is a requirement, because going into someone else's mind like this is a very dangerous thing. The assistant would find themselves in the coma-dream, but since it would not be their dream, or, even a true dream, so their mind and the spell combined would make it real, meaning that it would be lacking the mental protection that would wake them in the case of danger. If the assistant died in the dream, he or she would die out here. Also, since they would be mentally bound to the pat… to Mr. Potter, if he dies in there, if He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named kills him, the assistant would die with him." At this, the overheated warmth of the crowded room seemed to cool significantly.

Ginny, however, seemed unperturbed by this dire statement. Instead, she seized on what the specialist Healer had said before.

"So, just to make sure I understood, for someone to be able to join with Harry like this, they have to close to him to begin with?" she asked, anxious.

The Healer nodded.

Hermione spoke up, "So that means the only people who are qualified for this are myself, Ron and Ginny. We're the only ones close enough to him for this to work." She took a deep breath. "I'll do it."

"Me, too!" Ron and Ginny both eagerly said in unison.

"No. Absolutely not," Mrs. Weasley said. "Do you hear me, Ron, Ginny? You will not do this. Hermione can go, if she wishes, not that I could stop her, but you two are my children, and I will not stand here and watch you put yourselves in danger fighting that… that monster."

Both of younger Weasleys immediately protested their mother's edict. Loudly.

"Mum! How can you say that!"

"But I'm of age!"

"…Harry has saved half of the family…"

"…He's my best mate…"

"…including me when I was being possessed..."

By the looks of him, Scrimgeour would have been amused at their protests if their wands hadn't also been pointing at him and his party at the time, their agitation making red and gold sparks shoot out of the tips. Instead, he looked somewhat worried, making sure that none of the sparks landed on him, and most definitively irritated at having been shoved off to the side.

Nobody noticed the Healers conversing with each other quietly by the door as all of this was going on, not even Umbridge, whose beady little eyes were darting back and forth between Scrimgeour and the Weasleys as if she was watching a hyperactive tennis match as she lay on the floor.

Pomfrey was saying softly to her subordinate that had dangled this carrot in front of Harry's friends, "Lyta, you're not suggesting that we use…?"

"…Harry would do the same for me…"

The petite Healer whispered back, "…the _Communicus Morpheus _potion? Yes. It's the only way we can help Mr. Potter under these circumstances."

"…Mum, please, he's practically family…"

"Are you certain?" Pomfrey asked, still whispering. Alexander nodded.

"…he needs our help, Mum! We can't make him fight Voldemort alone!" Hermione looked around at the adults who were cringing and wincing at the name with a bit of disgust as Ron and Ginny continued their pleading rants and said, irritated, "Oh, come off it. Would you prefer if we used his real name?"

"…he's in danger in there, and I'm going to help him and you can't stop me!"

"There is a problem with that," Pomfrey whispered to Alexander, indicating the three teens with a nod of her head, as she straightened her glasses.

"…you should be ashamed of yourself, Mum. We owe so much to Harry as a family…"

"I know," the younger Healer said softly back. "Do you want to tell them, or should I?"

"…Dad with the snake bite, and myself with the poisoned mead, and…"

"I will," Pomfrey said, and, raising her voice, she suddenly cut into the strings of objections coming from the two youngest Weasleys.

"As good as it is to see how loyal the three of you are to Mr. Potter, I have to inform you that we only have enough of the potion required for this procedure for a single dose."


	7. Chapter 7 11:10 PM

Chapter 7- 11:10 P.M.

Harry was running blindly though the corridors, not noticing or acknowledging where he was going. All he could focus on was that his godfather was gone again.

_Sirius…_ It was like a physical pain, like the time before, all over again. Only this time… this time he wouldn't be forced to confront the pain by… _by Dumbledore… _The name rang through Harry's mind and the pain redoubled once more, his heart in a vise, as he, instead of confronting the pain, ran from it.

Harry turned another corner, not noticing where he was, his legs obeying their only standing order. _Run._ _Run away._ He didn't notice the open classroom door midway down the hall, or the hands extending from it; at least, he didn't notice them until he reached them. They seized him and pulled him inside the classroom in a tangle of limbs.

Harry fought to extricate himself from the jumble, jumping back up to his feet and was about to start running again until he realized who it was. Still in their cloaks were Ron and Hermione wearing concerned expressions on their faces. He heard the door close and whirled around to see Ginny standing by it. Seeing them, seeing their faces, filled him with such a sense of relief that his legs buckled, landing him back on the floor, sitting on his heels.

"Harry? You alright there, mate?"

Ron's words were the final blow to an already weakened dam. Harry started sobbing and slumped to the floor.

"Sirius… He got Sirius… He's gone…"

Harry felt warm arms picking him up off the floor and wrapping themselves around him. "It's ok, Harry. It'll be alright," Ginny said softly into Harry's ear as she cradled him in her arms. She whispered soothingly to Harry, rocking him back and forth for several minutes as Harry went to pieces in her embrace.

"Sirius… he's gone again… I couldn't save him, Gin… I was there, and I couldn't save him… he sacrificed himself for me, just like my parents did…" Harry said between sobs, the tears rolling down his face. "I can't face him… I'm not strong enough… the people I love keep getting taken from me…" Harry wept as Ginny held him close, emotional wounds long since closed reopening, and all the more painful for that, with no barriers for him to hid his pain behind inside of his own mind.

"It's fine, Harry… Everything will be alright… You can beat him… we won't leave you…"

After several minutes, Harry had pulled enough of himself back together to be able to function again. He looked up into Ginny's chocolate-brown eyes through his red-rimmed green ones. "Thank you," he said softly.

"Anytime," she said back, smiling.

Ron and Hermione had been sitting and waiting patiently the entire time Harry had been indisposed in Ginny's arms. Ron mutely handed him a handkerchief; Harry took it gratefully and blew his nose.

"Feeling better, Harry?" Hermione asked softly.

"Much. Thanks," Harry responded from behind the hankie.

After another minute or so, Harry felt almost back to normal; well, as normal as one can feel in a coma, with his personality fractured, and a personal enemy inside said coma with him with the intention of finishing him off. _And on that note, it is time to get back to business…_he said to himself.

"So," Harry said, getting back to his feet and stowing the handkerchief inside his pocket and his sorrow to the back of his mind, "where is everybody now?"

He knew from his questioning before, that his fragments, with the exception of himself, the primary fragment, could sense where the others were, himself included. They couldn't tell where Tom was, however, since he wasn't a fragment of _Harry's _mind, and thus didn't have the tenuous connections that bound the others together and allowed him to retain his personality in all of its aspects.

He remembered the conversation where they had laid out all the details of the fracturing, and his reaction to some features of it, back in that room.

'_So what happens if one you dies? Will I be able to think,' indicating Hermione, 'or feel,' looking at Ginny's image, 'or be myself at all?' he'd yelled at them. _

_Hermione had answered him. 'No, Harry, you'll have your personality intact if… **when **you leave the coma, just as it was.' _

'_Great,' he had muttered sarcastically. _

_The brunette had continued as if she hadn't heard him, 'In here, however, it will work a little differently…' _

'_Of course it will,' he had interjected, feeling very sarcastic, 'it's never that easy, is it?' _

'…_as, by killing the fragment, Voldemort isn't destroying that piece of your personality, he's just… making it harder for you to access it. So if I die…' _

'_**Don't even say that. Don't even think it,' **he had interrupted, his voice calm but dangerous at the mere suggestion. _

'_If I die, for example,' she had continued doggedly, 'you'll still have your intelligence, but it'll be de-emphasized, so you might start acting more impulsively, for instance,' she had finished with a nod to Sirius. _

_He had managed to calm himself down and had continued to pace in front of the fireplace. 'So why can't I communicate through this connection like the rest of you…'_

Dragging himself back to the present, Harry saw Ron, Hermione and Ginny looking at each other in askance at Harry's question. After a moment Ginny stepped forward.

"Well, the twins are currently trying to lever open the portrait hole into Gryffindor Tower, since the Fat Lady isn't there," she said, as Harry ticked off on his fingers. "Lupin and Cedric are searching the potions dungeons, trying to see if they can figure out what potions Voldemort has made, and Neville is on his way to join up with the twins."

_Wait… that's only eight accounted for…who's missing...? _"Where's Luna?" Harry asked.

"She's gone, Harry," Ron said, his voice choking. "He got her back in that room. Passed out from the gas."

Harry's knees almost gave out on him again and pain clouded his face. Forcing himself to remain standing, he said in a shaking voice, "Luna's gone?"

All three nodded sadly.

Within moments Harry's sorrow had transfigured itself to boiling-hot rage, charging back to the forefront of his mind. _No more, do you understand me, Tom? You've taken enough from us. No more friends, no more loved ones, no more families, no more lives. You'll take no more, _he promised himself.

His face set, Harry turned to the images of his friends and said, "Come on. We're going to Gryffindor Tower, meet up with the twins, and then we're going to take this fight to Tom."

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

While Ron and Ginny were gaping incredulously at Healer Pomfrey, Hermione asked quickly and anxiously, "Can't you brew some more of the potion?"

With a sad shake of her head, the senior Healer crashed their hopes. "I'm sorry, but since we so rarely have to use it, we only keep one dose's worth on hand at a time, and I believe it takes seven weeks to brew."

Ron spoke up. "What about buying some? Maybe the apothecary in Diagon Alley has some in stock…?" he asked in a hopeful tone.

His face fell when Pomfrey shook her head. "No, they won't have any. This is a very specific potion with a very specific purpose. The only reason that we keep any on hand is for emergencies like this."

"What about Professor Slughorn? Maybe he has some," Ginny said anxiously.

"I doubt it, dear," Pomfrey said, and added, upon spying Alexander's quizzical look, "He's the Potions Master at Hogwarts, came back from his retirement last year. My sister Poppy told me."

"Wasn't the old Potions Master the one who…" Andrews began asking, trailing off when he turned to look at Ron, Hermione, and Ginny and saw the deadly expressions on their faces. The remaining occupants of the room also looked at the teens and decided, as one, that now was really not the time for further conversation.

Utter silence reigned for several moments, as the trio, expressions wooden, kept their emotions covered outwardly at least. However, if the sparks shooting out of their wandtips were any indication of their mental state, they were all rather… _upset_ at the thought of Serverus Snape.

Hermione, surprisingly, seemed to be having the most trouble of the three keeping her state of mind clear if her wand was any indication; at the moment, it resembled a Muggle sparkler firework.

Scrimgeour and Percy froze, not quite as thoroughly as Umbridge, but still quite motionless, obviously worried about provoking them with any sudden movements, while Ron, Hermione and Ginny worked at keeping themselves under control.

When the sparks had ceased issuing from their wandtips, Pomfrey obviously felt that the likelihood of startling them and getting hexed by accident or impulse had diminished enough. She spoke up into the silence that had been dominated only by the sounds of Harry's monitoring spell, beeping, _lub-dub_ing, and chirping merrily to itself.

"I'm afraid that Ms. Granger is right; the three of you are the only ones close enough to Mr. Potter for this to work at all, but only one of you can actually go under and help."

Scrimgeour jumped in, feeling safer now that the trio of teens had calmed down somewhat. "Perhaps the Ministry has some in stock, or can get some here from abroad…" he said with a triumphant smile, clearly wanting to have Harry and his friends indebted to him.

Pomfrey turned towards him. "Certainly, Minister. Would you like to return to the Ministry to begin that search?" she said politely but firmly, obviously doubting his ability to find more of the potion, but clearly wanting the Minister off the premises before he triggered another incident. "We'll use what we have here, though, for the time being. Oh, and don't worry, we'll take care of Dawlish," for Scrimgeour had looked like he was about to interrupt, "As a matter of fact… Healer Andrews, would you be so kind as to take Auror Dawlish to the Spell Damage ward?"

Andrews moved forward quickly and conjured a stretcher, levitated Dawlish onto it, and left the room with the stretcher floating after him.

Pomfrey continued, "And as for Undersecretary Umbridge… Ms. Granger, would you be so kind…?" Hermione smirked lightly and preformed the counter-jinx. Moments later, Umbridge was climbing back to her feet. Hermione exchanged a grin with her boyfriend as she and Ron both silently noted that this was Umbridge's only change in posture where there was a noticeable change in altitude.

"Oh, and Minister?" Pomfrey said. "If you do manage to find another dose of the potion, please, send it along with someone else. We don't want to take away any more of your _valuable _time."

Shooting them all nasty looks, Scrimgeour, Umbridge and Percy turned to leave. Before they made it out the door, however, Hermione spoke up.

"Minister, I just have one question for you before you leave."

Scrimgeour stopped and turned with an ugly expression on his face. "What is it, Ms. Granger? Do you want to know what I came here for? Or perhaps, how much trouble you and your friends here are in? Or do you want information on You-Know-Who, perhaps?" he said, his uncanny resemblance to an elderly lion going beyond appearance and entering the vocal.

"No," Hermione responded, a feral smile on her face, "I just want to know…" She paused.

"Out with it, girl!" he fairly roared.

"…have you released Stan Shunpike yet?"

Scrimgeour turned a rather vivid shade of purple mixed with a deep scarlet, scowled at them and slammed the door behind him.

"I'll just take that as a 'No' then," Hermione said softly as she, Ron and Ginny looked at each other for a few moments, then spontaneously burst out laughing.

The adult Weasleys and Healers exchanged quizzical looks as Ron, Hermione and Ginny laughed themselves hoarse, with one winding down, only to catch, through eyes filled with tears of laughter, a glimpse of the other two hooting with glee, which would set them all off again.

After several minutes, they had managed to calm themselves down enough to be able to talk normally, although all three were clutching stitches in their sides, several hours of heavy stress unburdened in a few short minutes.

Hermione said, breathing as if she had just run a race, "Well, that got him out of the way." She gasped, clutched her side, and then continued, "Could you please bring the potion here? The sooner I take it, the sooner I can help Harry."

"Excuse me?" Ginny said, incredulous, though also winded, "Who said that you would be the one to help Harry?"

"I did," said Mrs. Weasley sharply, "and as much as I hate the idea of sending any of you into danger, Hermione is the logical choice to help Harry."

"But…" Ron and Ginny both protested.


	8. Chapter 8 11:30 PM

Chapter 8- 11:30 P.M.

Harry, followed closely by Ginny, Ron and Hermione, emerged from behind the tapestry-covered secret passage nearby Gryffindor Tower. Running quietly towards the portrait-covered entrance, Harry couldn't see anybody standing there.

Hoping that this meant that the twins had successfully gotten it open, he reached the (unoccupied) canvas and softly knocked on the frame.

It opened.

"In! Quickly!" Neville hissed at them, as they clambered in through the portrait hole. After they were all inside he shut it again.

Harry looked around the common room. It looked much the same as it had when he had left several hours previously, with the only difference being that someone (Neville?) had lit a fire.

Interrupting his inspection, the twins came down from the boys' staircase carrying backpacks full of bundles in a variety of sizes and shapes.

"George, Fred," Harry acknowledged them. Then his eyes fell on the sacks. "What are those?"

"These, Harry, are why we came here," Fred said, as he and his brother set their burdens down on one of the tables in the room. Pulling out the top bundle from his bag, he tossed it to Harry.

Harry opened the soft pack and pulled out…

"Now, why didn't I think of that?" Harry muttered to himself as he held the shimmering fabric of his invisibility cloak in his hands. "Alright," he said, wrapping himself in the cloak to make certain it worked, his voice issuing from apparently empty space in mid-air. "What's in the rest of those bundles?"

At that, Fred and George began unpacking the other bags, spreading their contents across the table. Harry shucked off the invisibility cloak and began to fold it back up.

"Decoy Detonators…" George said, placing down a box containing half-a-dozen small objects that tried to surreptitiously sneak out of their packaging.

"Marauder's Map…"

"Firebolt…"

"Two Cleansweeps…" as Ron and Ginny's brooms were added to the growing pile.

Harry placed the re-folded invisibility cloak on the table as the twins continued.

"Extendable Ears…"

The twins continued to add a variety of items to the tabletop heap, ranging from various Weasley Wizard Wheezes products to Sirius's pocketknife.

"Medical kit of basic healing potions…" George added a small white box with a red cross on it to the mass.

"Peruvian Instant Darkness Power…" Fred finished, a small vial of the stuff joining the accumulation on the table.

"Was my bottle of Felix Felicis also up there?" Harry asked hopefully.

His face fell when they shook their heads. _Oh, well, I guess that was too much to hope for…_

Harry looked over the mound of items on the table. The twins had chosen well; Harry could easily picture using them against Voldemort in this coma-dream. Except…

Harry tugged the Marauder's Map out from underneath a box of exploding smoke and concealment bombs. Holding it up, he said in a slightly puzzled tone, "But I thought that wands didn't work in here, so how can you get the map to work…?"

"Easily, Harry," Hermione said. "You're forgetting that while the wands don't work, there are sources of magic in here that can be used."

Harry looked intrigued. "Such as?" he prompted.

Hermione smiled and took the map from his hands and, as she opened it, she reached out and grasped Harry's wrist, maneuvering his fingertips onto the smooth parchment. "You, Harry," she said.

Harry gaped at her, then at his fingertips against the parchment, and then back to Hermione. "But…" he managed to get out, before Ginny walked over and put her finger on his lips, silencing him. "Just try it, Harry," she said softly.

Harry looked down at the piece of worn parchment at his fingertips. _I guess it can't hurt,_ he told himself, and shrugged.

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

Immediately Harry's jaw dropped as lines of inks spread from his fingertips and began to cover the page. He watched in astonishment as the Marauders' Map, Presented By Messrs. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs, Purveyors of Aids To Magical Mischief Makers, sprang back to life under his fingertips.

He looked up at Hermione, bewilderment written all over his face.

"How?" he asked, somewhat stunned. "How did I do that?"

"Well, Harry," she began, "Under the terms of the spell, wands don't work as magical foci. In the real world, what they do is channel magical energy from the witch or wizard, focus and enhance it, and cast it as a spell." Harry nodded that he understood; he remembered Professor Flitwick telling them that in first year Charms.

She continued, "But in here, the magic is pervasive, everywhere, as part of the spell and as part of _you_, Harry. So while the terms of this curse prevent either side from casting any kind of spell, there's nothing to prevent you from utilizing that magic in other ways, like the map," as she indicated the parchment.

Harry, curious as to the particulars of what she had just said, opened his mouth.

Just in time to scream.

A wave of nausea washed over his unprepared mind, doubling him over. A chill hit him, but not just any chill, not a chill as in, "Oh, its a little cold in here, I'll throw on another blanket," but more a chill described as the sensation of someone walking over your grave. Harry shivered from it, to use the generic term. In truth, they more resembled convulsions. On the floor, spasming, joints popping, Harry dimly realized what was happening though the nausea, cold and pain.

Voldemort had just killed another of his fragments and Harry, unprepared, defenses down, was feeling the pain through the link binding his shattered mind together.

After a few moments, the sensations passed, and Harry was able to get back to his feet shakily. He looked around the common room. He hadn't been the only one affected, although, by the looks of it he had gotten it the worst. Harry swallowed to clear his raw throat and asked in a wavering tone, "Who?"

Neville spoke up, voice quavering, and said one word.

"Cedric."

Harry had thought that he had been furious before, when he had heard about Luna. He hadn't even been close.

He ran over to the Marauder's Map, picking up the piece of parchment from where it had fluttered after he had dropped it, and began intensely scanning the map. As his eyes tracked up and down the lines of passages drawn on the map, he said fiercely, "Where is he, where is he, where the hell is he…?"

Hermione, looking rather green, got back to her feet and said quietly to Harry, "Cedric is… was on the third floor, Harry."

Harry immediately shifted his intent gaze over to that area on the expanse of parchment. Within moments, he hit paydirt.

"There!" he shouted. "He's on the second floor! Quick, grab the brooms and we can catch him!"

Harry dropped the map and ran towards the table. Yanking his broomstick out from the pile, upsetting a bottle of Chameleon Shampoo Additive (temporary, but irremovable, liquid Disillusionment Charm; "Make Your Enemies Disappear!") in the process, he ran towards the door, as Ron picked up the abandoned map from the floor and startled Harry with a sharp intake of breath and a muttered curse.

"What is it, Ron?" Harry asked, mounting his broom. Ron gestured mutely at the map. Harry looked at the worn parchment, not quite registering what Ron was showing him. Then he saw it, and the shock hit him so hard that he fell off of his broom.

Picking himself up off the floor, he snatched the map out of Ron's hands and stared at it desperately.

The dot darting around on the second floor labeled _Tom Riddle_ was fading in and out. As Harry watched, thunderstruck, it oscillated back and forth between there and not-there twice more, and then finally disappeared.

Feeling utterly stunned, Harry sank to his knees, the map held loosely at his side, the fury draining out of him, leaving behind a dull ache of anger and frustration.

"What just happened…?" he asked softly.

"Well, the curse is still in effect, Harry, so he's not dead. That much I do know," Hermione said. "But as for where Voldemort went, I don't know. It could be…" She trailed off.

"Could be what?" Harry prompted, feeling a mixture of desperation and irritation.

"Well, it could be that the map is your perception of your conscious mind, so since he's disappeared from the map that might mean that he's hidden himself in your unconscious mind."

Harry, sinking the rest of the way to the floor, began to massage his temples, fighting another headache. "What do you mean?" he asked, suddenly feeling very tired.

"It means," Hermione said, "that he's hiding in whatever part of this castle represents the part of your mind that operates below the threshold of conscious thought. Hum…" She stopped, finger tapping against her chin.

"What?" Harry asked, getting up from the floor.

"Well, that explains what Lupin and Cedric found in the potions dungeons," she said.

Harry, having moved to the table, paused in the process of loading down his robes with various items from the pile, to give her a curious and worried look.

"What did they find?" he asked, sticking Sirius's knife in his back pocket.

George jumped in. "Nothing."

"As in nothing there."

"No Voldemort…"

Fred continued, "No potions being made…"

"No dirty cauldrons…"

"No smells or smoke…"

"Just a bunch of empty, ransacked ingredient cupboards," George finished.

Hermione continued, "So that probably means that wherever he's hiding, that's where he's set himself up to make his potions, and that he's gone back to resupply."

His anger and frustration having increased with each word, Harry reflected on the medium-sized library of profanity that he had picked up over the last decade or so - mostly from Dudley - that would have described how he felt at the moment quite well; somehow, though, he refrained from venting his anger, and instead asked, through gritted teeth, "Is there any good news?"

"Well, as long as he's not on the map it means he's in his hiding place, so he won't be attacking us out here," Hermione said somewhat half-heartedly.

At this, Harry, pockets full, sagged into a chair as the others began to equip themselves, filling their cloak pockets with assorted and sundry items.

Lupin entered the common room at this point, looking winded but determined, his own face set. Harry acknowledged him with a slight nod, feeling too burned out from his emotional rollercoaster ride of a few minutes previously; just wanting to rest for a few minutes in his favorite armchair and recharge…

He watched Lupin walk up to the table and start to load up his cloak, taking the medical kit, a few smoke and noise bombs, along with some of the Weasley's Wildfire Whiz-Bangs from a medium-sized, mostly empty crate labeled _Deflagration Deluxe_ sitting open on the table and the remainder of the bottle of Chameleon Shampoo Additive that Harry had upset, its former contents now rendering a portion of the tabletop, and some of the supplies, transparent.

As they were detangling and dividing up the Extendable Ears from their box, Harry picked up the Marauders' Map and began to stare intensely at the spot where the dot marking _Tom Riddle _had disappeared. After a moment or two, his eyes began to wander aimlessly over the parchment…

And landed squarely on the library.

Harry started in his chair. "Hermione," he said in a low, intent and intense voice, "didn't you say that the library represents my memory?"

"Yes, Harry. What about it?"

"So all of my memories are in books like the one that Cedric showed me, the one with my discussion with Dumbledore?"

"Yes, but…"

Harry cut her off. "So, for Tom to have looked through my memories, like he obviously did to know my name and such, he would have needed to go through a lot of books, right?"

"Yes, Harry, but could you please explain what you mean?"

Harry got up out of his chair and strode over to the portrait hole, suddenly feeling a lift in his mood. "C'mon. We're going to the library. Let's see if we can get an idea of what Tom knows about me so far, and how far he's gotten in catching up on what I know about him."

"But how are we going to do that?" Neville asked, puzzled.

"Easily," Harry said, grinning like a Cheshire cat. "I have a really hard time picturing Voldemort re-shelving books at all, much less when he's so pressed for time."

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

"…now remember, Ms. Granger, that when you first join with Mr. Potter, it will take several minutes for the spell to reach its full potency. So when you first find yourself in Mr. Potter's mind, you will not be able to move for the early portion of that time. You will be able to hear what is going on almost immediately after the connection is made, however, and sight will follow shortly. When you find that you can speak, the connection will be at approximately half-strength. Movement will be possible shortly thereafter…"

Hermione listened intensely as Healers Pomfrey and Alexander prepared her to undergo the potion/spell procedure that would allow her to enter Harry's coma. They had been advising and informing her for the last ten minutes about the spell, the effects and what she could expect.

"…if what we know about this curse is correct, Mr. Potter's personality has probably shattered into about a dozen semi-autonomous fragments, each with a different aspect and avatar…"

Ron was listening with half an ear. To say that he was unhappy was a bit of an understatement at the moment. Not only was he worrying about the life of his best friend, but couldn't do a thing to help him, he had to stand by helplessly and watch his girlfriend prepare herself to be put in the same situation.

"…so you might find yourself sharing an avatar with a fragment of his personality, or potentially, forming your own independent image in his mind..."

Ron thought back to the row of several minutes previous. He and Ginny had fought tooth and nail to be the one to go under, against their mother's wishes. While she hadn't been pleased at the choice, Mrs. Weasley had backed Hermione as the one to take the potion; as the most experienced and powerful of the three, she had argued, who could be a better choice? Ron hadn't bought that; he knew that his mother didn't want to risk her youngest children, especially when there was, to her mind, a much more suitable candidate available.

"…the primary fragment will have the avatar and personality of Mr. Potter and will act as a sort of central hub for the connection holding his mind together. While the other fragments will have different avatars, please remember, even if they are images of people you know, or even yourself, they are not those individuals; they are representations of portions of Mr. Potter's personality…"

Ron had been convinced several minutes into the shouting match. Between Hermione's pleading with him to see reason and his mother's temper, he had backed down; he hadn't been very happy about it, but he had backed down. Actually, it had been more his girlfriend on the edge of begging him that had made him back down. Ginny, on the other hand, had taken a few minutes more to convince. Quite a few minutes more.

"…if you find yourself sharing an avatar of yourself with a fragment of Mr. Potter's mind, you will, in all likelihood, be incorporated, to some greater-or-lesser degree, with that portion of his personality, including the specific memories of that avatar since the spell began, as well as…"

There was something about Ginny that was nagging Ron. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but there was _something._ She had put up quite a fight for her to be the one to help Harry, and had only conceded defeat after Mr. Weasley had pleaded with her to see reason. At the moment, she was sitting in her chair, glowering at her parents, Ron, and, most especially, Hermione. She was also apparently listening intently to the Healers' words as they instructed Hermione; Ron had expected that.

"…I have had to use the _Communicus Morpheus_ potion seven times in the past fifteen years, but always for a deep or irreversible coma caused by other means, and always as a last resort," Alexander was saying in her most professional tone. "However, this is the first time that we know of that it will have been used to join with a person in Mr. Potter's precise situation, as the spell You-Know-Who (Hermione successfully resisted the urge to roll her eyes) used on his receptacle has not been used in well over half-a-millennia…"

His sister had obviously dearly wished to be the one to go under and help Harry. Hell, he was surprised his sister hadn't just hexed Hermione to get her out of the way. Well, maybe not _that _surprised, as their mother was in the room, and there was no way she could have the bollocks to do anything to Hermione with their mum being right there… Then again, she _had_ hexed Dawlish and taunted and threatened the Minister… However, on the other hand, he had also done that, so he could hardly blame her. But there was definitely something about Ginny's behavior that didn't add up to him…

"…also, please remember, be prepared for possible settings for the coma-dream. This spell uses a location from the memory to represent the mind. It will be, in all likelihood, highly complex, and very realistic. Considering Mr. Potter's personal history, we consider the most likely location to be Hogwarts. However, there is a small chance that the spell will have selected another location. We believe possibilities include Diagon Alley…"

He thought it over, taking apart aspect by aspect, strategizing and analyzing as if in a chess match. It was definitely Ginevra Molly Weasley sitting like a half-tamed tiger in the small ward, two seats over from where he sat; she hadn't been replaced or controlled, so it couldn't be that...

"…the potion will take effect almost immediately. Remember, it's important to take the dose as quickly as possible, preferably in a single swallow."

It wasn't the row several minutes earlier; if anything, Ron would have said that she had given up too easily. It wasn't her current temper with the other occupants of the ward; Ron was also rather angry with his parents, although, admittedly, he was more worried about Hermione than upset with her.

"Now, Ms. Granger, we'll be needing your wand for the procedure, as well as Mr. Potter's, so if you would please…"

Besides, although Ron didn't like the reason for it, he had to admit that 'Mione looked good in the hospital gown that her robe had been transfigured into. As a matter of fact, she looked _very_ good in it. Maybe later the two of them could… _Whoa there, Weasley, _he told himself, _you can fantasize about your girlfriend later._ Ron descended back into his reverie, eliminating possibilities, one after another, as Hermione handed over hers and Harry's wands to the senior Healer.

The sound of Healer Smethwyck entering the small ward, carrying the vial of potion for Hermione to take, barely registered on Ron's consciousness. Having, by that point, exhausted all of the individual possibilities, he had begun to look at possible combinations of what might be bugging him. He was so intent upon this that he barely heard Healer Pomfrey ask Hermione if she was certain and ready to undergo the procedure.

Her affirmative reply to both questions, however, ejected him from his contemplative trance with all of the grace of a patron from a bar being forcefully assisted by the bouncer.

He looked up at Hermione, the reality of the situation suddenly sinking in. She was going to be in a coma, with Harry, putting her life on the line, fighting a fragment of the soul of the Darkest Wizard in over a century, and he could do nothing to help. Pushing his nagging feeling about Ginny to the back of his mind, he rose from his chair, and went over to Hermione, unaware of how close he had been to figuring out Ginny's secret plan, something which would have dire consequences in the near future.

"Yes, Ron, what is it?" Hermione asked, the small vial of silver-colored potion in her hand, hair bound back into a ponytail to keep it out of the way for the procedure. She had never looked so beautiful to Ron, but then again, he had told her once that she could be dressed in a burlap sack and he would still think that.

In a voice rough from anxiety, Ron said, "Good Luck, 'Mione," and pulled her into a tight embrace, not caring that his parents were in the room, not knowing, or particularly caring, if they knew about the two of them.

Somewhat startled at this public display of affection, Hermione just sank into the embrace at first. Within moments, however, she had wrapped her arms around him as well, and, as their lips found each other, they began kissing passionately. Ron feeling determined to give her something to remember, determined not to be saying goodbye, but to give her something to come back to after facing that monster, determined to show her how much he loved her. He didn't care that all eyes in the room (excluding Harry's, of course) were on them; Ron's entire universe was the petite, brown-haired, brown-eyed witch in his arms.

He pulled her in tighter, feeling her ribs and backbone underneath his hands through the thin hospital gown, feeling just right, not prominent like Pansy Parkinson, who looked like her skin had been stretched taut over her bones by some spell, or buried under flesh like Millicent Bulstrode, who was currently giving Dudley competition, as Harry had commented during one of his rare lighter moments.

Ron remembered Hermione joking a few weeks previously about the 'Saving the World' exercise plan, after he had first made that particular observation about her figure after an extended snogging session. This single recollection was but the first pebble in an avalanche of memories that cascaded through him, and he went with the flow of remembrances, paying no attention to the increasingly urgent messages from his ribs and lungs as his reminiscences of Hermione hit him, full force, and he welcomed them.

He remembered their first real kiss, five months previously. He remembered when he had told her that he loved her, moments before that. He remembered waking up one morning in Grimmauld Place a month previously on the couch, still in his rumpled clothes from the previous day, a heavy book on his lap from a overlong research session the previous night, and Hermione asleep in his arms, her book fallen on the floor, her face at peace, clear of the persistent nightmares that plagued all three of the trio. He remembered when he had realized that he was in love with her, really, truly, in love with her. He remembered one night, after a six-hour-long strategy session with Tonks, Kingsley, and Lupin, her saying sleepily to him that, while his time with Lavender had upgraded him from teaspoon to tablespoon, he was currently at serving spoon status and was headed rapidly in the direction of ladle. He remembered dancing with her at his brother's wedding. He remembered a night back in September when she had woken him at three in the morning, screaming and moaning in her sleep in the room next door, and that all it taken to calm her down in the midst of her nightmare was his voice and his touch. He remembered Charlie saying, when he came to Grimmauld Place on Order business, that they had the worst case of head-over-heels-in-love he had ever seen, then Hermione having pulled him into another kiss in pointed response, whereupon he had dimly registered his older brother saying something about being scarred for life and being worse than Bill and Fleur and then leaving the kitchen to the snogging couple. He remembered the ring… the ring…

The ring which was now waiting in a Muggle jewelry shop, waiting with a deposit under his name. He and Harry had gone for a walk through Muggle London two weeks previously to clear their heads, while Hermione had declined to come along, staying behind at Grimmauld Place, and he had spotted it, sitting there in a glass display case in the window, as if waiting for him. He and Harry had ran straight to Gringotts to get money out of Ron's vault and changed it into the appropriate Muggle money for the deposit.

It had taken every single Knut (and Sickle and Galleon) he had, but now, now there was a silver ring, an engagement ring, set with a sapphire and two small diamonds, with his name next to it on the deposit slip, waiting for him. Waiting for him to come and finish buying it, even if it took the next two or three years, so he could give it to Hermione.

More memories, memories of rows in the common room and battles with Death Eaters, of Christmases and summer breaks, of trolls in bathrooms and Slytherins in classes (much the same thing, really), of Yule Balls and giant snakes, of her and her alone, spun through his brain, no thought in his mind except for her; a situation that was about to be changed.

Rudely.

"_ACCIO POTION!_"

The moment Ron heard the shouted spell he realized what had been nagging him about Ginny in a fraction of a second, boiling back to the forefront of his mind, the pieces falling together in an instant.

It had been the look on her face when she had first come into the ward. The other emotion that had been written on her face, the one that he hadn't identified before Healer Alexander had come in, hitting him with the door. It had been Determination, written all over her face, not hidden below her emotional shields as it must have been ever since. Determination to help Harry, the man she loved, no matter the cost or obstacles.

Before, she had protected Harry from the Minister, not caring that, in all likelihood, she had just ruined her future by standing up to him. Then, just before, during the row, she had given up too easily, enough to put Ron off of her trail. She had listened intently to the Healers lecturing Hermione, drinking in the information. All the while planning to take Hermione's place, to be the one to go under and help Harry, putting on a good show, trying to fool anyone who might have guessed her plan and succeeding.

What had happened then, he realized, was that Ginny had waited for the opportune moment, waited for Hermione's grasp on the vial to loosen as she was wrapped in Ron's embrace, waited till the angle was just right, so that there would be no obstacles between herself and Hermione, no chance that someone else could catch the vial in mid-air, not allowing the slightest chance of interference, and summoned the vial from a mere six or seven feet in front of her.

The vial of the silvery potion flew out of Hermione's weak grip and into Ginny's waiting hands.

Ron and Hermione simultaneously broke the kiss instantly, whirling towards Ron's only sister.

"Ginny, NO!" they both cried, but it was too late.

In a single, smooth motion, Ginny had opened the vial and drained the contents in a single swallow. Suddenly feeling very cold and weak as the potion began to go into effect, she said softly to the shocked room, "There, now you have no choice but to use me…"

Ginny felt the empty vial slip from her fingers along with her wand, and dimly heard the sound of shattering crystal as she felt herself falling down a long, dark and cold tunnel…


	9. Chapter 9 Midnight

Chapter 9 – 12:00 Midnight

Ginny slumped like a puppet with its strings cut and toppled towards the floor. Only Healer Smethwyck's quick reaction kept her from landing on top of the shards of broken crystal from the potion vial. Recovering from their shock at Ginny's actions, Healers Andrews and Alexander ran to assist, helping Smethwyck with her dead weight, holding her in a fireman's carry between the three of them.

As they were struggling with the limp Weasley, Ron and Hermione heard Healer Pomfrey mutter under her breath, "Foolish girl," and then in a more normal tone, "Quickly, now. We haven't much time."

As they carried her to the ward's medical bed, placing her next to Harry, Mrs. Weasley said in an angry tone that barely hid her terror, "What are you doing? You can't join her with Harry!"

She was deflected from her building momentum by the Senior Healer as the trio of Healers set to work on Ginny, racing to prepare her before their time ran out.

"No, Mrs. Weasley, we have to. Your daughter was right; we **don't** have a choice but to use her. That potion is designed to put people into a coma. If we don't connect your daughter to him right now, within our limited window of opportunity, she will descend into a true coma, and there will be no way of knowing when, or even if, she will come out of that. Please, let us do our jobs," she said, holding Harry's wand in her left hand, Ginny's in her right, having just retrieved it from the pile of crystal shards. Then she added to the fourth Healer in the ward, "Smethwyck, please go and get four doses of the Draught of Peace from the potions repository. I believe they are needed here."

"But… but…" Mrs. Weasley sputtered as Smethwyck left. Mr. Weasley, who looked to be on the verge of tears himself, pulled his wife into an embrace. She began to sob into his shoulder, feeling completely useless and totally helpless.

Ron and Hermione, still clutching each other, stared with horror and shock at Harry's and Ginny's bodies now laying side by side, shoulders touching, a nightmare version of many a dream shared by both of the people now lying motionless in the small ward.

Hermione tore her gaze away from them and buried her face into Ron's strong shoulder as Healer Alexander transfigured Ginny's robe into a hospital gown and magically bound her red hair into a plait, the magical medical monitor spell already cast and floating above the youngest Weasley.

Pomfrey looked over to her patients and subordinates. "Are we ready?" she asked in the voice of an experienced medical professional.

"Almost," came the curt and focused reply from Andrews, who seemed to be rubbing down Ginny's left temple with his wand, almost like a Muggle nurse wiping down an area in preparation for an injection. "Alright, we're good."

"Time," Pomfrey said flatly.

"We have… approximately one minute to begin the connection," Alexander stated.

"Alright then, let's get started."

Pomfrey moved to the head of the double bed and stood between Harry's and Ginny's heads. Holding each of the wands above the head of its owner, she looked up, an intense and focused expression on her face. "On three, then," she said, as Alexander and Andrews held their wands at the ready.

"One…" Hermione pulled her face away from the comforting, and now quite damp, surface of Ron's shoulder and turned towards her two comatose friends.

"Two…" Mrs. Weasley's face was currently a mixture of fear for her daughter and intense anger, the former promising hugs, kisses and coddling, the latter indicating that it might be safer for Ginny to stay in the coma with Voldemort until her mother passed out from exhaustion.

"Three!"

The Head Healer simultaneously tapped Harry's and Ginny's temples with their respective wands, withdrawing the tips with silvery strands of thought clinging to them. She looked up at her subordinates, both of whom were ready and waiting for her signal. "Three… two… one…" She brought the wand tips together, as the two younger Healers simultaneously cast spells on the smoky strands.

When the light from the spells faded, Ron looked at the space between the heads of his sister and best mate and stifled a gasp. Pomfrey had withdrawn the wands and now there was one continuous filament of wispy thought linking their temples, their bodies, their minds… their souls?

Ron was shaken out of his horrified reverie by Pomfrey's voice.

"Alright, looks like a good, clean connection. Concur?"

"Concur," chorused Andrews and Alexander.

Hermione looked at the monitor spells floating above Ginny's and Harry's heads. There, on Harry's, on the enlarged brain wave section, along with the bright graph lines labeled _Potter_ and _Riddle_ – and that being a compromise between her and Ron and the Healers, _'We can't bloody well put 'You-Know-Who' down on that thing, now can we?'_ he'd said- was a new, dim green line. _Oh, Ginny, why…_she thought, but then, she already knew why.

"Alright, then. Alexander, how much time do we have to complete the other six?"

"Approximately five minutes," was the almost toneless reply.

"Let's get cracking then," Pomfrey said as she placed the wands next to their owners' temples. "One… Two… Three…"

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

Ginny fell.

She fell for an instant.

She fell for an eternity.

Time had no meaning in the bottomless, cold, and dark pit she plummeted down.

There was only one thought in her mind as she plunged into the black abyss.

_Hang on, Harry… I'm coming…_

Then the connection was made and she hit bottom.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

"…inny, Ginny, please wake up. Please, please, please wake up. Tell me what happened, please. Ginny, please…"

Ginny listened to Harry pleading with her with the disengaged interest of a student in a double History of Magic class. Then, suddenly, the realization of what had just happened, what she had just done, hit her in a rush and she started, her mind suddenly active and abuzz, her body… not so much. Ginny couldn't move.

Remembering what the Healers had told Hermione, Ginny realized that it would take several minutes for the connection to reach full potency. Well, at least she could hear what was going on, as she fought down the panic that comes part-and-parcel with being in a body that doesn't work. This was only temporary, she knew, thankful that she had drunk in the Healers' words before, and she settled in to wait.

"Hermione, what did Tom do to her?"

Ginny suddenly felt her sense of touch kick in, the sensation similar to blood flowing back into a numb area, but all over her body, but thankfully absent the pain and pins-and-needles feeling. She was in a sitting position, leaning against something solid, but soft, and warm. She had just come to the realization that she was being cradled in Harry's arms, with her head against his chest, when she became conscious of another voice.

Inside her head.

It sounded like Harry, but, strangely, like herself as well. The voice was loving and caring, soft and beautiful, and… panicking and cursing?

_Oh my God, Gin, what have you done? Bloody Hell! What have you done! How could you... why did you…_

The voice, and its attendant panicking, nearly made her miss Hermione's sharp intake of breath and soft, "Oh. My. God."

"What? What is it, Hermione? Is it something to do with Ginny?" she heard Harry ask, clearly, at least to her, barely restraining panic.

_You bloody stole that potion from Hermione… you shouldn't have… You idiot, I love you… why did you do this for me…_

Ginny suddenly realized that she could see. The connection must be strengthening, she reasoned, and tried to remember what the Healers had said would be coming next. She found she couldn't move her eyes, much to her dismay, but even the narrow field of view that wasn't obscured by Harry's chest showed her that she was in the Gryffindor common room by the portrait hole.

She suddenly saw Hermione move into her field of view. Ginny watched as the image of her best friend bent down and looked her in the eye. Then she spoke.

"Harry, that's Ginny."

"I know that, Hermione!" came Harry's worried, and irritated, reply.

"No, you don't understand, Harry. That's Ginny Weasley, as in the actual Ginevra Molly Weasley, the first female Weasley in six generations, the girl you love, the one who you made stay behind for her own protection, inside your head."

Ginny realized that she must be sharing the avatar of one of Harry's fragments for him to be reacting this way. _That must be that voice I'm hearing,_ she reasoned. A few moments after she thought this, the connection must have strengthened further, as, suddenly, she had access to some of the memories of the fragment… and of Harry.

Caught up in the fragment's memory of holding Harry an hour before much as he was now holding her, Ginny nearly missed feeling his posture stir. Within moments of Hermione's statement, she felt his body shift beneath her, feeling his muscles in his chest move, and guessed that Harry was looking down at her. She could easily picture the incredulous look that was surely on his face, brow furrowed, his green eyes alight with puzzlement. She sighed. She loved that look.

Suddenly, she realized that the little corner of her mind where the voice had been coming from- if something as ethereal as a mind can be said to have corners- had gone silent. Instead of the voice, she could _feel_ Harry, feel his concern, his confusion, his love for her, rolling and roiling down the connection. There were also the other fragments, feeling more distant but distinctly there, as if she was feeling them _through_ Harry, as if he was some sort of central hub.

"But how…?" he asked Hermione, as Ginny suddenly became conscious of the fact that she had actually _sighed_! She could talk!

"mmm… muuh… muuuuuhhh…" she mumbled.

_What the...! Bloody Hell, I thought I could finally talk!_

Harry and Hermione, meanwhile, had taken notice of her mumblings, and were now looking anxiously at her. Harry turned her around in his lap, holding her upright by her shoulders, his face mere inches from her own.

"Ginny…?" he asked, somewhat hesitantly.

Ginny suddenly realized that she could move slightly and, being related to Fred and George Weasley, pranksters and jokesters extraordinaire, acted somewhat impulsively.

"mmmmmm…"

Harry's lips were just as soft as she remembered.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

"Well, that's all seven of them," Pomfrey said, placing the two wands on the nightstand on Ginny's side of the width-expanded bed. "All seven strands. Now what, Lyta?"

Alexander was staring attentively at the shimmering, flowing, and twisting rope of thought strung between Harry's and Ginny's temples, a rope that writhed like something living.

"Well," she replied thoughtfully, "the connection will continue to strengthen on its own over the next several minutes. There are several spells I'll be using during that time to assist the process and ensure a strong and stable link."

She turned her attention to the graphs hovering in mid-air, as the three Weasleys and Hermione were being given the Draught of Peace by Healer Smethwyck. Tapping the floating displays with her wand, she labeled the new, and now significantly brighter, brain wave line _Weasley_, and studied the frenetic activity of the glowing green lines pensively.

After a moment, she said, "Well, first off, even though the connection is only at half strength right now, it's so intense that it easily rivals others that I've done when they were at maximum potency; Mr. Potter and Ms. Weasley must have been very close for this strong a connection to have formed so quickly."

As the rest of the room seemed to absorb this statement, Alexander dropped another one.

"Well, the procedure seems to have worked, as Ms. Weasley is certainly conscious and moving within the dream environment."

Hermione looked up from her half-finished vial of Draught and said, "How do you know that?"

"Easily," came the answer from the petite Healer, indicating Harry's and Ginny's graphs with her hand. "They're interacting. See how the graph lines affect each other, influencing the other? (Hermione nodded) How they're interacting, I can't say, but they are definitely affecting each other, and strongly."

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

Wrapping her newly mobile arms around him, Ginny pulled him into the kiss, as he strangely didn't resist her; actually, she realized, he was going along with her, leaning into the kiss, his distant surprise coming down the connection melting into love.

_Wow_…It was one thing to hear someone tell you that they loved you; it was quite another to actually feel it, to feel their love for you, Ginny thought through her haze of happiness and delight, knowing full well that this moment was temporary, that they would have to end it soon, but determined to enjoy it as much as possible and for him to do the same.

As they lay there on the threadbare carpet, wrapped up in each other, Ginny felt his love for her coursing down the connection, and sought to return the favor in the only way open to her as she increased the passion of the kiss, dimly thankful that, technically, they didn't need to breathe in this coma, so they could keep on going and going…

Even so, after a few moments or possibly several sunlit days, they broke apart.

"Hello," she said in a low and bemused tone.

"Hello, Gin," he said in a similar, but more serious voice. "What… How did you get in here?" he asked.

She smiled languidly at him and stretched like a cat, her body, or avatar as Healer Alexander had called it, feeling very sore from the initial connection. As she stretched out her neck to work out some of the kinks, she looked around the common room and nearly laughed. They were sitting on the same spot where they had fist kissed all those months ago, and now, as then, there were a crowd of people standing around with the two of them as the center of attention.

"Well, Harry," she said, stretching out her arms, "you're in St. Mungo's at the moment; Ron and Hermione brought you there after you destroyed the cup-Horcrux and you collapsed…"

Harry sat there quietly on the floor, with Ginny in his lap stretching out various joints as she brought him up-to-date on the past five-odd hours in St. Mungo's, with some minor editing on her part.

"…me, Mum and Dad got to the hospital around ten-thirty, a Healer had come and gotten us from the Burrow…"

"…you had looked like you had been given the Kiss, lying there on the bed like that…"

"…Scrimgeour came and tried to have you taken 'into custody'…"

"…Hermione ended up hexing Umbridge…"

"…so I volunteered to take the potion…"

After she was done, he looked down at the image of the… no, at the _woman_ he loved, resting in his embrace, recovering from the stresses of the initial connection.

"Why do I get the feeling that you're not telling me something about that potion you took?" he said to her and was rewarded by her looking somewhat furtive for a moment.

"Now why would you feel that?" she said lightly, suddenly praying that the connection with him didn't go both ways.

He looked at her intently. She could feel his gaze burning into her as if he could see right through her and she carefully kept her features schooled in what she hoped was an innocent expression.

After a few moments, he sighed and closed his eyes.

_Yes!_ she thought triumphantly, and highly prematurely, as, a few moments later, she heard Hermione's voice.

"Ginny, are you _completely certain_ that there's nothing else you want to tell Harry?"

_Oh, shite_, she thought, as she felt the Hermione/intelligence-aspect's knowledge of what she had done through the link and realized that there was no way she was going to get away with lying to Harry about stealing the potion from the real Hermione back in the ward.

She tried anyway.

"No, not really, no," she said, her voice rather meek and highly unconvincing.

"What is it, Gin?" Harry asked, his voice like steel covered in velvet.

"Well, it's just that I, um, that I, uh…" _Blast it,_ she thought. She hadn't anticipated this! When she had decided that she was going to be the one to help Harry, no matter what her mother had said to the contrary, it had been simple: take the potion, join Harry in this damnable coma, and kick Tom's sorry arse, along with the rest of him, straight to hell.

"What she's trying to say, Harry, is that Hermione was supposed to be the one to take that potion and that she took it from her as she was kissing Ron goodbye before taking it herself; and that if the fragment of your mind that she's sharing dies, or if you get killed, she dies too," Hermione said.

Harry's hardened gaze returned to her and she wilted. If it was one thing to share and actually _feel_ someone else's love, to feel his love for her, it was quite another to feel the burning torch of his anger, the bonfire of his frustration, and she shied back for fear of getting burned, scorched, charred, seared by his raging inferno.

"So," he demanded, "is it true?"

Not daring to meet his eyes, feeling his love for her, along with his anger, determination and frustration, through the link, she nodded.

Harry stood up, leaving her sitting on the floor, and strode over to the portrait hole where the other fragments were mutely waiting.

"Coming?" he asked, clearly upset with her for putting herself into harm's way for his sake. She nodded and stood, knowing from the memories that the connection gave her that they were going to the library.

As they were walking down the hall to the secret passage, Harry turned to her.

"By the way…" she stiffened, dreading what he would say next, "…thank you."

Somehow she managed to get out through her surprise a squeaky, "For what?"

He smiled grimly and stopped walking.

"For coming in after me, even when you didn't have to and shouldn't have."

"Oh."

He started walking again towards the tapestry, but not before finishing, almost undetectably, "…and for giving me another reason to kill that bastard."


	10. Chapter 10 12:30 PM

Chapter 10- 12:30 A.M.

"…DO YOU REALLY THINK SO LITTLE OF ME, MUM, THAT YOU THINK I WOULD WILLINGLY LET MY ONLY SISTER PUT HERSELF IN HARMS WAY, BECAUSE IT SEEMS WHAT'S YOU'RE SAYING!" Ron shouted at his mother.

Hermione winced in her seat. Ron and Mrs. Weasley had been rowing with each other for the last five minutes.

"…WELL, _RONALD_, I DON'T KNOW. AFTER ALL, YOU DIDN'T TELL ME THAT YOU AND HERMIONE…"

It had started shortly after they had finished linking Harry and Ginny…

"…_so now what?" Ron had asked Healer Alexander, who Pomfrey had asked to stay and monitor the connection, as she was the resident expert on it. She had agreed after Pomfrey had promised to inform her fiancée, Byron, that she wouldn't be home that night._

_The mediwitch had answered, "Now? Now we wait."_

"_But… but..." Ron had blubbered._

"_I'm sorry, Mr. Weasley, but there's nothing else we can do at this point but wait for Mr. Potter and Ms. Weasley to emerge from the coma…" Alexander said._

_Mrs. Weasley cut her off. "But you must have something? Another spell, a potion, a charm, a talisman, something! I mean, you're healers, for God's sake! You've got to have something!" she said, on the verge of hysteria._

"_I'm sorry, Mrs. Weasley, but there's nothing more I can do but stay here and monitor Mr. Potter and your daughter for any changes, help keep them stable in case of any emergencies…"_

_At this, Mrs. Weasley let out a small cry and sank back into her chair. Mr. Weasley put a comforting arm around her shoulders as the Weasley matriarch broke down and cried, the full realization of what her daughter had done flooding through her, all of the terrible scenarios running through her mind in full detail etching away at her sprit and will._

_After several minutes of her heaving sobs, Ron managed to tear his horrified gaze away from his sister and best friend, lying prone on the bed, bound together by a silvery rope of thought, and turned to his mother._

"_I'm sorry, Mum," he said, "I'm so sorry. If I had figured it out just a bit sooner…if I had seen it sooner, I would have stopped her."_

_He turned away after she didn't respond._

"_Would you have? Stopped her?" a hard and angry voice came from behind him._

_Ron wheeled around. His mother was looking at him with fury in her eyes. _

"_What do you mean by that?" he said, feeling his stomach lurch at the look his mother was giving him._

"_What I mean by that is would you have stopped her? I mean, look, Hermione's still awake and walking around…" Mrs. Weasley said, a note of hysteria taking hold in her voice._

Don't rise,_ Ron told himself, it's the grief talking, it's not mum, it's the grief; she's not sure if she'll ever see Ginny alive again and she's lashing out at the nearest target…_

"…_and look, your sister took the vial right out of her hands when you two were standing there, all nice and happy," Mrs. Weasley snorted and continued, "but you didn't want Hermione to go under, so you helped your sister ignore my wishes and…"_

_Ron couldn't hold himself back any longer. "That's absurd! I would never…" and that was as far as he got before his mother exploded._

"_NO! WHAT'S ABSURD IS THAT MY ONLY DAUGHTER IS LYING IN A COMA THAT SHE MIGHT NEVER WAKE UP FROM AND THAT HER OLDER BROTHER HELPED PUT HER THERE!"_

_Ron had gaped like a fish for a moment at his mother's unfounded accusation, along with everyone else in the room. Unfortunately, however, he had recovered first… and retaliated. That had been five minutes ago and things had gotten worse from there._

Hermione sat quietly in her chair as her boyfriend and his mother yelled back and forth, staying as unobtrusive as possible, not wanting to get pulled into the emotional argument. She and Ron had had some spectacular rows over the last seven years, but they were nothing, _nothing,_ compared to this.

For her part, Hermione was stunned, numb. She had been ready to help Harry, ready to be put in a coma to help the man she considered as a brother… and Ginny had snatched that away from her. She felt absolutely useless, absolutely helpless. She glanced over at Ginny, lying on the bed next to Harry, both of them looking so peaceful and serene in the midst of the shouting match that Ron and Mrs. Weasley were engaged in.

A shriek of outrage tore the air in the middle of one of Mrs. Weasley's grief-driven rants and she sagged into the waiting arms of her husband, who helped her into a chair, still shouting but softer and softer, until she was only mumbling, her agitation too great to quell even with the spell that had apparently been used on her. Hermione and Ron, startled at this, looked and saw Healer Alexander standing behind where Mrs. Weasley had been ranting at Ron. Floating next to her was an apparently miniature version of her monitoring spell; instead of graphs, it had numbers. She waved her wand and the six-inch tall translucent outline of a neutral human figure disappeared, along with the backwards Arabic digits.

She looked at the shocked teens and said grimly, "I regret having to do that, but her blood pressure was 220/180, had been for five minutes, and I was worried that she was going to have a coronary. Don't worry, it was a simple sedative spell, we use it to calm and immobilize hysterical patients; it's sort of a softer Stunning spell. I'll give her a more-strongly brewed Draught of Peace when the spell wears off in a few minutes."

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

With the twins in the lead, Harry, Ginny and company walked down the corridor leading the age-darkened double doors of the library. With Neville keeping a close watch on the map for Voldemort's reappearance, they reached the doors and entered the familiar domain of Madam Pince, and stopped dead.

The place was a shambles; the contents of several entire bookcases within sight of the doors were on the floor, and, judging by the enormous pile of books on one of the study tables, Harry was certain that they were not alone in being ransacked.

Ginny swallowed at the sight of the devastation. _He did all of this in less than three hours? What was he looking for?_

Harry was looking over the raided library with not a small amount of irritated anger, barely noticing Ginny's expression as she struggled with mild trepidation. _Great,_ he thought, _how much ground do we have to cover?_

"Alright," he said, "This is what we're going to do. We'll pair off, so nobody's wandering around alone. Neville, Remus, stay here, Neville keep an eye on the map. Remus, you go through that table of books, see what he decided was important enough for him to carry them all the way out here."

He turned to the twins and said, "Fred, George, you two take that part of the library," motioning to the left of Madam Pince's desk, which was the general area where, in the real library, the Potions, Defense Against the Dark Arts, and Transfiguration stacks were.

Harry continued, "Ron and I will take over there," indicating to the right of the massive circulation desk, towards what would have been History of Magic, Astronomy, Arithmancy, and Divination sections.

"And, Ginny, you and Hermione can take the middle," which included Herbology, Muggle Studies, some various stacks categorized as _Other_, and the Restricted Section.

Ginny opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it again. She guessed that Harry was still upset with her and, based off of what she was feeling from the link, that if she went with him to search this library, they would be getting very little actual searching done as they would either end up shouting at each other or snogging each other silly.

She was starting to get the feeling that, since she was joined with the avatar of Harry's ability to love, she was increasing the intensity of that emotion for him due to the presence of her own love for him. Increasing the potential, so to speak, she thought with a small wicked grin, a grin that she immediately stifled when Ron looked at her, a mixture of alarm and warning in his expression.

Ginny turned to the Hermione-avatar, said, "Shall we?" and walked off towards the bookcase that in the real world was labeled _Electricity._

Harry watched them go into the stacks and turned towards Ron. With a forced cheer that he knew was fooling nobody, he said, "All right then, let's go. History of Magic section first; I've got a hunch."

They walked through several of the other sections on their way to the History stacks against the far wall. Overall, they were untouched, if a little bare, with only the occasional volume on the floor to show that Voldemort had even looked through here. Bending over to pick one up in the Divination section, Harry flipped through it.

Not surprisingly, considering the metaphorical nature of this damn coma so far, the book didn't deal with Divination, per se. Instead it was a memory of a daydream he had once had, back at the end of his third year, a daydream that had involved Sirius being declared innocent and Harry going to live with him instead of the Dursleys. Harry felt a sharp pain at the thought of Sirius, but managed to keep it contained. Sirius, both the real one and the metaphorical one that had sacrificed himself two hours previously, wouldn't want him to cripple himself with grief. Harry set the book down on a half empty shelf and looked around.

_But where are all the other daydreams I've had?_ he wondered. _These few shelves can't be all of them, so where did they go?_

Dismissing the thought as unimportant, he continued walking down the aisle and turned into what should have been the History of Magic section.

And stopped.

The area had been completely and utterly demolished. It looked like Voldemort had simply tipped over the bookcases, dumping their contents on the floor, and then stood them back up. There was only one set of shelves in the entire section untouched. All of the others were scattered on the floor in a pile the length of the aisle and a foot or two deep.

Harry knelt at the entrance to the center aisle, picked up one of one of the books and looked at the bronze cover titles.   
_Voldemort…  
Tom Marvolo Riddle…  
Horcrux…  
Diary…  
Prof. Slughorn…  
_  
Harry felt a small thrill of satisfaction at having his hunch proven correct; the History of Magic section was his mental record of his encounters with and knowledge of Voldemort. The thrill was quickly swamped by horror, however. How could they tell what Voldemort did and did not know from this _mess_ of books scattered over the floor? Where would they even begin?

Gritting his teeth, Harry turned to Ron, who had started picking up books from the floor and placing them haphazardly back onto the shelves.

"Don't bother, mate. Let's just go through them and pile them up, get an idea of what he could know."

Ron nodded grimly, sat down on the floor and started pulling books towards himself.

Harry, stepping gingerly through the carpet of books, made his way to the middle where the untouched shelves was. Checking them over, he saw, without surprise, that they dealt with the cup-Horcrux that had landed him in this predicament to begin with.

He turned to Ron. "I'll go the other end and start looking there; we'll meet in the middle." Ron absently nodded that he understood, his shaggy red hair getting into his eyes as his head bobbed. He pushed it back out of the way absently as he concentrated on his current book, which seemed to be about the size of a small hippopotamus, and shrugging absently, tossed the book aside; there was an appreciable vibration in the floor when it landed.

Harry carefully stepped through the books on the floor, not knowing what the permanent consequences would be if he damaged any of the books. Musing that he should have asked Hermione before she went off with Ginny… with Ginny…

Harry lost concentration as the image of red hair, freckles, and a wide grin invaded his senses, and made a misstep onto a purple and black bound cover, which slipped out from under him. Startled, Harry swung his arms out and managed to grab a hold of the empty shelves on either side of him, preventing a forceful introduction of his bum with the floor.

Pulling himself back upright, Harry turned around towards Ron, who was still squatting on the floor, undoubtedly knowing that Harry was all right; Harry could have sworn that he saw a slight smirk amid the freckles on the image of his best mate's face for a moment.

Turning back around, Harry continued over to the far end of the aisle, determinedly keeping himself from thinking about her.

Reaching his destination, he carefully bent down, cleared himself a spot on the floor and sat.

It took him seventeen books to realize that he hadn't registered a single thing listed on any of the covers, his mind having been stubbornly stuck on the memory of their kiss back in the common room a half-hour previously.

Ears burning in a shade that the real Ron would have been proud of, Harry looked at the books he had gathered together, determinedly not glancing at Ron as he did so. His heart sank. One of the slimmer volumes read:  
_Voldemort  
Job interview  
Defense Against The Dark Arts job  
Defense Against The Dark Arts job jinx  
_  
Another had the Gaunts listed, along with the ring that Dumbledore had destroyed, and their speculations about the locket. Another entire book was filled with the various discussions that he had had with the real Ron and Hermione over the past six months about its possible whereabouts.

Harry began to clear himself a path back to Ron, roughly stacking the books up against the shelves after giving them a cursory glance.

The rebirth ceremony, the Sorcerer's Stone, information about his scar, the battle at the Ministry, it was all there. _Merlin_, Harry thought, _What doesn't he know now?_

Harry picked up another book, this one green and blue, from the floor in front of him, glanced at it, made to put it on the stack next to him, and stopped. _  
Horcrux…  
Diary…  
Basilisk…  
Parseltongue…  
Ginny…_

_Ginny… Ginny… _The name reverberated in his mind and he finally allowed himself to listen to his own thoughts.

He loved her. He loved her to a degree that he had never known to be possible. And she loved him. And she was here. With him. With Tom. She could die in here. But she loved him and… and… _And what?_ he asked himself.

Harry sighed, and set the book down on top of the stack and got back to work going through the scattered books, not knowing, unable to know, that the book was one of a set of two and that he would be seeing that missing volume later. In Voldemort's hands.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

As Harry unknowingly buried an important clue underneath more tomes, a clue that would allow him to figure out, with Ginny's help, where Voldemort was hiding, the aforementioned female Weasley, along with the avatar of her best friend, were wandering through the Restricted Section, having already investigated the Muggle Studies section.

They had found little of interest there; the memories that the books detailed were, not surprisingly, of Harry's life at 4 Privet Drive. A few of the books, the few that Voldemort had taken interest in from the way that they were scattered and thrown, were on the now-defunct protection that Dumbledore had placed on that residence for Harry.

On their way out of the area, Ginny had glanced through several of the volumes that had been left on the shelves. Glances that left her blood boiling and a determination to inform the twins that they had a new tester available for their shop: one Marjorie Dursley. _'Do they use the cane at St. Brutus's,' _she thought scathingly. _I don't know, but I bet Gred and Forge can raise some by you._

They continued up the main aisle, walking past untouched after untouched side aisle. Ginny was being uncharacteristically quiet. She and the Hermione-avatar had exchanged words back in the Muggle Studies section and she was still musing about what had been said.  
_  
'Why didn't you let Hermione do it, Ginny?'_

_If Ginny hadn't been anticipating the question, she would have admittedly been taken off guard by the apparent non sequiter._

_'Because I love him,' she had curtly replied._

_'Hermione is like a sister to me, but you, you are…,' Hermione's image replied, as Ginny reminded herself that, as much as it looked like Hermione, it was really Harry in there; a piece of him, anyway._

_'I'm what?' Ginny prompted._

_'My reason for existence, my reason to keep on going. And now you're here, right in the line of fire. Gin, do you know what I… we… Harry has nightmares about each night?'_

_'Judging by the way this conversation is going, I'm going to guess it's me,' Ginny said, bending over to pick up a book lying open on the floor._

_'Every night it's the same; nightmares of you, in danger, and him helpless; of you dead, dying, gone… He has one of Colin's pictures of you next to his bed, where he can see it first thing in the morning and remind himself that it was just a dream. And now you're here, in this dream, and it's like one of those nightmares come true.'_

_Ginny turned, trying to block out the feelings coming through the link: Thoughts of her from Harry, concern from Hermione, Ron's understanding of her loyalty, Lupin's determination to protect her…_

_'Do you know what I feel for Harry? Please, look into my mind and see how much I miss him, how much I love him everyday, how each night I have nightmares that always end with his limp body lying under a Dark Mark, how every morning I check the Daily Prophet for news about him, how…' Ginny paused in her emotional rant, a memory from the previous summer bubbling to the surface. She remembered the words to a song, a song from a book that Hermione had given her to ease the pain of her breakup with Harry.  
_  
'Bring me the love that ascends as far into the heavens as the gods can reach. Bring me the love that is the ultimate joining of two essentials, with nothing withheld, nothing rejected. Bring me the love that is returned stronger than it was given, that grows more powerful and irresistible with each exchange. Bring me the love that enriches all it touches, transmuting misfortune into promise, weakness into strength, selfishness into generosity, limitation into possibility. Bring me the love that knows no borders.'  
_  
Ginny smiled as she finished reciting the verse._

_'That's what I feel for Harry,' she said, feeling as if she had gotten her point across._

_Hermione's image gazed at her for a few moments and then looked away and sighed._

_'I understand,' the intelligence-avatar said, 'because he feels the same for you.'  
_  
Ginny was brought out of her musings on her conversation in a rather abrupt way; she tripped.

On a rather large book lying on the floor.

Ginny preformed a classic four-point landing: both forearms, left knee and stomach, punctuated with an "Umph!" as the wind was knocked out of her by another large book, this one standing upright with its spine in the air. It flattened as her stomach hit it straight on, forcing all of the air out of her lungs.

She lay there on the worn library carpet, and atop of a good number of books, for several moments, stunned and panting. When her vision refocused itself, she found herself looking into the eyes of a concerned Hermione.

"You all right?"

Ginny said, "I'm fine." Or, more precisely, she _tried_ to say, "I'm fine." What actually came out of her mouth was more along the lines of, "..enm… phign…"

Hermione helped her to a sitting position, leaning her up against the side of a bookcase.

"Stay here. Try to take deep breaths and you'll feel better in no time."

Ginny nodded and wheezed painfully as she tried to breathe, feeling like she had stitches in her sides that were made of rope. As she sat there gasping for air, Hermione got up and went to investigate the aisle whose scattered books Ginny had tripped over.

Picking up the books that Ginny had quite literally stumbled onto, she looked them over.

"These books are about the Order!"

Ginny looked up and managed to wheeze out a fairly coherent, "What?"

"These books are about the Order!" Hermione repeated. "Look, this one is about the Christmas when your dad was in St. Mungo's with that snake bite, when we were all staying at Grimmauld Place…" _Lucky me…_Ginny thought to herself somewhat miserably, her ribs aching. "…this one is about is about the cleaning we did at Headquarters the summer before that..." she bent down and picked up another book up off the floor, "this one is about the discussion we had with Harry when he got to Grimmauld Place after Tonks and Moody went to go get him, this one is about Kreacher…"

Hermione prattled on for a moment, looking over the pile of books as Ginny wheezed and then suddenly realized the significance of her unwitting find.

"Hermione," Ginny said with some difficulty. "Those books aren't… aren't about the Order, they're… they're about… about _Grimmauld Place_," she emphasized.

Hermione looked shocked.

"You're right!"

She dropped the half-dozen books in her arms back onto the floor, and dropped down herself, looking at the scattered manuscripts.

"This one is about Harry's room… this one is about all the times we've tried to remove or shut up Mrs. Black's portrait… this one is about the Black family tree tapestry…" she looked up at Ginny, horrified.

"Ginny, do you know what this means?"

Ginny, feeling almost back to normal, said, "I'm going to guess that they're here in the Restricted Section because of the Fidelius Charm on Grimmauld Place…" Ginny's face suddenly flashed with understanding and slowly continued, "…and since Voldemort could read those books without any problem…"

"… it means that he now knows where Headquarters is for the Order," Hermione finished, her face a study in worry.

"But what about the Fidelius Charm? I mean, Moody didn't actually_ tell_ Voldemort where headquarters is, and he's the Secret-Keeper…" Ginny's voice trailed off at the expression on Hermione's face.

"It doesn't matter. He knows where Headquarters is, and the Charm didn't stop him in here… probably because, as far as the Charm is concerned, that piece of Voldemort's soul is a part of Harry because of this curse…"

They both fell silent, the possibilities too numerous and too worrisome.

After a moment, Ginny said, "Listen, Hermione, let's split up; we can cover more ground that way. I'll go look around the area and see if I can find anything else that he touched."

"Ginny, Harry said we're supposed to stay in pairs," Hermione responded.

Ginny waved her off. "You know as well as I do that the only reason that he did that is because this connection only works one way with him," _and that's a pity_, "so he needs someone with him to help him." Ginny focused for a moment. _But I'll know if you find something and visa versa, _she sent through the link.

Hermione looked at her for a moment, considering, and said, "Fine, then. But don't wander too far."

Ginny smiled and wandered off down the aisle.

As she walked, paying much more attention to her surroundings this time, she noticed that, just like the real Restricted Section, some of the side-aisle ends were labeled, and some weren't.

Examining one, she read _Marauder's Map._ She smirked. _Yeah, that certainly qualifies as something secret._

Continuing her way down the aisle, all of the stacks that she passed were untouched. _Maybe he spent too much time ransacking the Grimmauld Place section and never got around to going down this far._

Keeping an eye out for any more ransacked stacks as she made her way down the aisle, she nearly missed the label on the end-case of one of the untouched stacks as she saw it out of the corner of her eye. A few moments later, it registered on her consciousness, provoking a double-take so violent it nearly gave her whiplash.

Rubbing her sore neck, she took a closer look at the faded, handwritten label, a label that read _Ginny Weasley._

_What the…? Why is my name on a label in the Restricted Section?  
_  
Intensely curious, Ginny ducked down the side-aisle to come face to face with hundreds of plain black leather-bound books sitting neatly on their shelves.

_Okaaaayyyyyy…so what's going on here?_ she thought to herself.

Craning her neck, ignoring the protesting crick in her muscles, she looked over the books. Sure enough, the spines all had her name on them, in fancy gold lettering, along with a date.

_I guess these are Harry's memories of me. _She grinned at the thought, a grin which was quickly replaced by a curious frown. _But what are they doing in the Restricted Section?_

Taking a closer look at the dates, she realized that, thankfully, they seemed to be in chronological order. She was currently looking at books dated from the previous September. Quickly scanning back and forth, she found that the black-bound books covered a span of about a year and a half, starting from shortly before her fifteenth birthday, right up to the present.  
_  
Alright, so where are the rest of them? I've know Harry since I was eleven; I know he ignored me for four years, but not that completely! So where did those memories go?  
_  
Ginny reached out to take down one of the books off of the shelves. Her hand touched one, and she jerked it back as if burned. _I shouldn't; these are Harry's memories, and I have no right or reason to go poking through them._

_But then again, they _are_ memories of me, so it's not like they're anything new to me; they're just from Harry's perspective, not mine, that's all. I wonder… where's his memory of our first kiss?_

Suddenly keen on finding that magical moment from Harry's perspective, she began to scan the spines, looking for the numbers that stood for that wonderful day.

As she was closing in, she noticed something odd about the books. The early ones, the ones from two summers ago, which she had been looking at a minute before, were fairly slim, some of them so thin that the spines were barely wide enough for her name and the date. But the ones currently in her field of view, dating from the previous March, were enormous! Some of them were easily wide enough to have her name written horizontally with the date underneath.

She spotted the book she had been searching for and froze. It was the last of the fat books; starting right afterward, they slimmed down dramatically; she glanced up at the early books on the top shelves. Those earlier dates were slimmer, but not by much. Her eyes returned to the book in front of her, and then, almost involuntarily, started tracking to her right. Further down the shelf, after what looked like several weeks worth of memories, the books started to thicken again.

She shuffled over to that point and let out a low agonized moan. The date written on it was for Dumbledore's funeral.

Not daring to look at that book she scrutinized the tomes making up the following summer and felt her jaw drop. If the books preceding their dating had been enormous, then these were gargantuan! Not one had a width smaller than the width of her palm, and some were as large as the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary that her father had for some reason, or even larger!

_What the hell are in these books? _

Her curiosity burning, she reached out at random and pulled out a book with a good five-or-six-inch spine with a date from about three or four days before Bill's wedding. Holding the nearly five-kilo book awkwardly in her hands, she sat down and, holding the book in her lap, opened it to a random page.

Her eyes opened very, very wide.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

In a Muggle pub in central London, a lone figure sat in a corner booth, sipping his fourth bitter since his arrival a half hour previously, an activity which kept him from compulsively checking his watch.

_Where is that little arse? He was supposed to be here twenty minutes ago!_

Well, at least this place was a safe location to have an unobserved meeting. The Ministry was too spread around, partly thanks to his own efforts, hunting Death Eaters and jumping at shadows to be monitoring even all of the wizard pubs, let alone the multitudinous Muggle bars in London. So as long as they didn't do any magic in here, they should remain undisturbed, assuming, of course, that that little annoyance ever got here!

Noticing that his current pint of Fuller's Chiswick was nearing the dregs, he was about to order another one when a squat shape in a cloak and gloves swept into the booth, clunking down two pints of Guinness Stout on the table as he sat.

The first figure immediately grabbed one of the glasses and downed half of it in one swallow. The second figure, whose face was hidden under his hood, was probably smiling contemptuously at his companion's nervousness.

Holding up his own glass in a ridicule of a salute, the squat figure said mockingly, "Thirsty?"

The first figure scowled and snarled in a low voice, "You were supposed to be here twenty minutes ago! What kept you!"

The squat figure looked around the nearly full pub, the noise of the half-drunken crowd nearly drowning out the sounds of the telly hanging over the bar. The telly which was the reason why most of the Muggles were there that late in the evening anyway, as the bartender had it tuned to the Ashes series cricket game being played in Australia.

Thus assured that they wouldn't be noticed, the squat figure leaned closer as the crowd of Muggles roared their disapproval as Australia scored another run.

"I'm sorry," the thickset figure said sarcastically, clearly not sorry at all, and took a swallow of his beer. "Now what was so important that you needed to owl me in the middle of the night?"

The first figure looked at his short contact with intense dislike, sincerely wishing that he had been assigned somebody else, anybody else, as his contact. Hell, he would have even taken Crabbe or Goyle.

The object of his dislike took another long swallow from the glass in his right hand, the gloves he was wearing _almost_ but not quite covering the fact that his right arm seemed to be made of silver as it disappeared up into the sleeve of his cloak.

Leaning conspiratorially across the table, the first figure said, "About two hours ago, the Minister came back from St. Mungo's in a rather bad mood…"

The short Death Eater interrupted, "So what else is new?"

The traitor continued as if he hadn't heard the faithless Marauder, "…and immediately got the Department of International Magical Cooperation to work searching for this rare potion abroad."

His contact yawned and looked at his mostly empty glass, obviously debating about a refill. "And I should care, why?" he said.

"Because, from what I overheard the Minister talking to Weasley, apparently _Harry Potter_ is in a coma in St. Mungo's, and they need the potion for him."

Pettigrew's posture suddenly changed. The traitor obviously had his attention.

"Potter's in a coma? What can you tell me?"

"Well…"


	11. Chapter 11 1:15 AM

Chapter 11- 1:15 A.M.

Hermione sat in her chair in Harry's closed ward, still feeling numb from Mrs. Weasley's words. She knew that she hadn't meant them, that it was the grief, but still, she had said them. Even though they had been targeted at Ron, they had affected her as well. And add Ginny's actions, taking away Hermione's own opportunity to help the boy she considered to be as a brother, and it was a miracle that she was sitting here with a stunned and blank look on her face as opposed to giving Moaning Myrtle competition in the crying and wailing department.

She scanned the room, more out of habit than out of any real interest, her anesthetized mind seeing, but not registering.

Mrs. Weasley was currently asleep in one of the chairs, primarily thanks to a potent sleeping and anti-anxiety potion that Alexander had given her. Still, as powerful as that potion was, about a third of the indicators on the miniature monitoring spell floating above her head were amber in color- attention. Lyta had set the spell to give an alarm if more than half of them slipped out of the green- nominal- or if any hit the red- emergency.

Ron had left shortly after his mother had been given the potion, claiming that he was going to get some food and tea from the tea shop on the top floor; that had been over twenty minutes ago, and he still hadn't returned. She knew that he was walking around somewhere in the building, trying to keep his frustration, anger and own grief at bay while he dealt with his mother's words and his sister's actions. Prat. She was sitting here, hurting, and he was off on a walkabout! Selfish prat! She _needed _him here, but he was too scared, too scarred by his encounter with his mother to stay for long, needing space.

Burying her anger, Hermione continued her survey of the room.

Harry and Ginny were still lying there on the bed peacefully, in repose, arms at their sides, eyes closed, thought-rope connecting their temples. If not for the rise and fall of their chests and the constant blips, beeps, tones, _lub-dubs_ and other assorted sounds of the monitor spells, she would have thought them dead.

Alexander was currently dozing several chairs over from where Hermione sat, conserving her energy for when it would be needed. Hermione secretly envied her, envied her apparent ability to simply let go for a time and relax, to catch rest when she could, while Hermione was stuck, running in circles, her thoughts just building and building and building and building with no resolution in sight…

Mr. Weasley cleared his throat expectantly. Hermione looked up at him, realizing what was about to happen.

"So, you and Ron finally figured it out apparently?"

And, again, she was right. She didn't get surprised often; actually, the last time she had been this taken by surprise had been a week previously; the time before that had been at Hogwarts, with Snape and Malfoy… Hoping that tonight would not be a repeat of the attack on Hogwarts, with Dumbledore dead… but then, Ginny had stolen her chance to help tonight…

Another cough sounded and she realized that Mr. Weasley was looking at her quizzically.

_Oops, _she thought, _got a little lost in there, didn't you, Granger?_

"Yes, we figured it out finally," she said.

He smiled.

"Good."

After a few more moments of silence, he spoke up again.

"When?"

Hermione thought to herself, _or in other words, how long has Ron been 'neglecting' to tell you and Molly?_

"About five, six months or so; when we were at Harry's relatives house."

Arthur smiled again.

"Tonks is going to be happy."

Hermione looked at him, puzzled.

"Why would Tonks be happy about Ron and I getting together?"

His grin was a carbon copy of the one that his son had flashed at her on her eighteenth birthday. When she had walked into her bedroom. Which had been filled with conjured flowers. Lots and lots of conjured flowers: carnations, daffodils, tulips, honeysuckle, daisies, orchids, azaleas, lilies, and the most difficult of all to conjure, several dozen long-stemmed roses.

"Because the rest of the Order was in on the betting pool and she won," Mr. Weasley said, clearly enjoying every moment of this conversation.

There were about two seconds of silence as Hermione's expression rapidly began resembling a tomato in color. A tomato that shortly burst.

"WHAT! YOU HAD A BETTING POOL GOING!"

Mr. Weasley, still grinning like the proverbial cat that ate the equally proverbial canary, said, "Well, actually, there were two pools; one for when you two would finally figure it out and get together, and the other for when you two would gather the courage to tell me and Molly." He considered for a moment, looking over at his dozing wife. "More Molly than me, I think though."

Hermione held her face in her hands. Somewhat muffled, she said, mortified, "Alright, let's have it; what were everyone's bets?" _Might as well get this over with._

"Well, actually this little pool has been going on for almost a year now (Hermione groaned). You see, Molly found this necklace in Ron's room after Ron, Harry and Ginny went back to Hogwarts after last New Years; a rather gaudy piece if I do recall, with 'My Sweetheart' as the pendant…" Hermione choked back a laugh, knowing Lavender's tastes in jewelry from dorming with the girl for six years. _So that's what Harry was taking the mickey out of Ron about! _

Mr. Weasley was still talking; Hermione made herself listen instead of imagining the looks on Ron's parents faces at Lavender's gift dangling from Molly's hand.

"…So here he are, standing in the kitchen, sharing what little we knew from Ginny and Harry, when Moody, Tonks, Lupin and Shacklebolt drop by."

Hermione made a noise that sounded like something of a cross between a strangled laugh, a snort, and the words, "Oh no…"

Mr. Weasley's eyes twinkled in a way very similar to those of the late headmaster.

"Oh, yes. I must say, Moody's reaction to that sparkling bit of metal was most amusing. I believe his words were something along the lines of, 'Better let me check that thing over. Something like _that _is clearly heavily cursed...'"

She couldn't help it this time; she burst out laughing.

Wiping the tears out of her eyes, she looked over at Mr. Weasley, who smiled at her, his expression merry.

"So after we explained to them about it, I believe it was Remus who said something along the lines of wondering when Ron was going to remove his head from his arse and notice you (Hermione giggled). After the rest of us agreed with the sentiment, Tonks said that she was putting five Galleons down on the summer…"

Hermione felt her face flush.

"…and after that, the rest of us there put down our bets." Mr. Weasley looked morose for a second. "Oh, well, there goes my two Galleons."

But when he looked back at her, his expression was cheerful once more.

"So, after that, we _had _to let the rest of the Order in on it; of course, we had to get Albus and Minerva to promise not to use their authority to put you two in joint detentions or patrols or whatnot; primarily because Albus had his money on you two together by late May."

Hermione smiled at the image of Dumbledore cheerfully plunking down several golden coins and realized Mr. Weasley's objective in telling her all of this.

"Thank you," she said.

He gave her his fatherly smile, and said, "I thought that you would need some cheering up after what Molly said before; she didn't mean a word of it, you know."

"I know."

"Actually," his smile shifted from fatherly and back to amused, "she was one of the most optimistic out of all of us; she bet on you two telling us at Bill's wedding that you had gotten together."

She groaned. "And who won that pool?" she said, wishing that Ron would get back from the tea shop already and share in the embarrassment.

Mr. Weasley beamed and said, "Actually it was Minerva who won that, if you count yours and Ron's little display before as telling us." He considered for a moment and said, "Well, I guess it does. Anyway, she said something about a 'Yule brawl' or something to that effect…"

Hermione colored, the memory of her in her old dress robes, yelling at Ron, suddenly flashing before her eyes… _'Next time there's a ball, ask me before someone else does, and not as a last resort!' _

"…we weren't exactly sure what she meant by that; all she said was that it was the first sign of mutual attraction between you two…" _My God, _Hermione thought, _was it THAT obvious?_ "…but she wouldn't give us any details."

_Thank Merlin for that,_ Hermione thought. It was bad enough to suddenly find out that they had been rowing loud enough for McGonagall to hear them from her office down the hall; if she had told the rest of the Order what she had heard that night…

A sudden thought occurred to her and a feral grin suddenly crossed her features.

"Mr. Weasley… Arthur, when Ron gets back from the tea shop, do you want to tell him all this, or can I?"

He smiled. "Be my guest."

"Thanks."

_That should keep him happy,_ she thought to herself. _And it was very nice of him to spend the time and effort on cheering me up with Ginny being in that coma; then again, cheering me up certainly kept him distracted from his daughter's situation. _Then a sudden thought struck her. _Oh, dear God, just don't ask…_

As if on cue, Mr. Weasley coughed, clearly preparing himself to ask another question, undoubtedly one of a _personal _nature, considering the way his ears were coloring.

…_about that,_ she thought weakly, feeling the color return to her face with a vengeance.

"There is one other thing," he said, clearly embarrassed, his ears coloring to the point where they would probably be visible in the dark, lightly glowing red. "If I may?"

Hermione nodded very slightly, feeling as if her face was going to melt from the heat and fall off if she moved her head any more than that.

"You and Ron haven't, excuse me, haven't, um, _done _anything? Uh, gone too far?" her boyfriend's father asked, his ears red enough by this point to serve as possible ignition sources for minor flammable objects.

"No!" she blurted out, horribly embarrassed, and then, calming herself, said, "No, we haven't."

And they hadn't, truthfully. _Well, to be honest, they _were_ sleeping in the same room… but in separate beds! _she thought, _and for a good reason!_

She remembered, back in September, a nightmare that had featured two glowing red eyes igniting her parents' house afire, the crackling of the searing flames sounding like laughter, maniacal laughter over the screams of those inside, the heat of the flames keeping her at bay, her wand spouting more flame when she had tried to use _Aguamenti, _the Flame-Freezing charm only making the blaze roar higher, hearing her parents screaming her name in agony… and waking up in Ron's embrace, shivering, him whispering soothingly to her as she sobbed in his strong arms.

Shortly afterward she had fallen back to sleep, a sleep untroubled by red eyes, unhooded Dementors, werewolf fangs, marching undead, headstones with the names of her friends and family, and all the other assorted themes that her unconscious mind had come up with over the past several months. All that dream had featured was red hair, blue eyes, and an intense feeling of security and love.

Two days later, Ron had moved his mattress into her room, and neither of them had suffered a nightmare since, the presence of their love keeping the bad dreams at bay. They slept the sleep of the innocent and just, especially after she had found an anti-snoring potion for Ron to use.

By mutual, and unspoken, agreement, they kept to their own mattresses, although they both made occasional jokes about the room being cold at night.

Of course, there was also a memory that had been consistently intruding on her thoughts for the last week, sort of like the songs that get stuck in one's brain, but much more pleasant in this case, of course, causing random instances of dreamy smiles, wistful sighs and other similar phenomena. It was interesting how a little slip of paper could put her in a state that had Harry privately convinced that she was losing her mind…

_Hermione went into Ron's room, next to her own, hunting for a book that she suspected was in there and, rather than try and Summon it through a closed door, she decided to take a look in there herself and see what else had migrated its merry way up there._

_She opened the door and sighed at the sight that greeted her. The place was a mess! Clothes all over the floor, a few solitary hangers dangling forlornly in the half-opened wardrobe, the floor of Pigwidgeon's cage covered with a few moldy old newspapers coated with owl droppings, and the desk surface completely covered in parchments with Ron's messy handwriting on them. _

_With a sigh, she Summoned the Muggle cleaning appliances that they had purchased a few weeks previously and had then enchanted to help clean the demented building that the Blacks had once called home and gave them their instructions. _

_As she watched the mop and bucket gather up Ron's clothes from the floor and begin to wash them, she had an amused flashback to her childhood, watching Disney movies with her parents, remembering the mild irony of her five-year-old self's favorites: The Sword In The Stone and The Sorcerer's Apprentice. _

_Suddenly hoping that the mop wouldn't be fetching water when she turned around, she gave a little chuckle at the thought of Ron's expression seeing that_ particular_ depiction of Merlin, starting up an assembly line of dish washing and cleaning, as she dived into the mound of parchment that Ron called a desk. _

_As she sorted out piles of parchment, she mused to herself somewhat wistfully about cuddling on a couch somewhere with Ron and watching those childhood movies together, wondering what his reaction to The Reluctant Dragon would be, when her hand encountered…_

'_Paper?' What was a slip of thin Muggle paper doing on Ron's desk, amid all of the heavy parchment, broken quills and empty inkwells? _

_Her curiosity getting the better of her, she looked and nearly collapsed from shock. _

_She took another look, her mind still not comprehending, for once, the words printed there. Squeezing her eyes shut, she took several deep breaths and cracked open one eye. She immediately thought that she was delusional, even though the slip of paper quite clearly read:_

Customer Copy

Deposit Payment Receipt for-

_one size 7 ring, silver, sterling_

setting(s): _one sapphire, round, 4mm, two diamonds, round, 2mm_

Style ID #: _8/26_

Customer Signature:

_Ronald Weasley_

'_Oh my… Oh my God… Oh my God!' she gasped, her mind reeling._

_Hermione stood next to Ron's desk for nearly a minute, staring in muted shock at the piece of paper with a jeweler's logo at the top, a price figure (excessive), and Ron's scrawled signature. She… she knew that she loved him, and that he loved her, but… but this? So soon? _

_Yes, she knew, intellectually, that times of war tended to have higher marriage rates; not knowing if you would live to see tomorrow had a distinct tendency to make people live for the here and now. Still, was what they had together just that, two people coming together for mutual pleasure or was it something more? _

_She closed her eyes as the question caromed around inside her skull, loosing memories as it went: Ron, looking at her with concern in his blue eyes as he wiped away the tears from her latest nightmare; Ron, kissing her tenderly and lovingly; Ron, with his head in her lap as he dozed; Ron, dancing, actually dancing, with her at his brother's wedding; Ron, lying in a bed in the Hospital Wing, croaking out Er-my-nee; Ron, making the three of them breakfast in his flannel pajamas, pancakes, with maple syrup that he got from God knows where; Ron, studying a book the size of a paving slab with her, cuddled next to each other on the floor, each of them studying a page; Ron and Ron and Ron and RonandRonandRonandRonandRonRonRonRonRonRonRonRonRonRonRon…_

_She smiled softly. It _was_ something more; something so much more than pleasure, passion, or mutual attraction. It _was_ love. She knew that there was no one else for him or for her; she had seen his soul (almost literally) and knew it well, as well as he knew hers. They weren't two people who came together through circumstance; they were two halves of a single person, neither one truly complete without the other…_

_Hermione opened her eyes and smiled, a smile that was only the barest window into the joy permeating her. She looked down at the piece of paper still clutched in her hand. It's a question, she realized, albeit an unknowing and highly premature question, but it is still a question nevertheless. No, she had corrected herself, it's _the _question. And the answer to that question was…_

Yes. I will.

_Putting the slip back down on the desk, she then proceeded to mess up the neatened piles of parchment, her normal aversion to doing so quite gone as she covered her tracks. _

_Now to get that slip of paper to a safer place than his desk…_

_She made her way downstairs, finding Harry and Ron eating a mid-afternoon snack in the kitchen while pouring over biographies of the Hogwarts founders._

'_RON!' she shouted, trying as hard as she could to keep her tone cross over her internal joy. He jumped a good two feet into the air, hitting his knees on the underside of the table. _

'_What?' he responded, clearly confused as to the reason for being yelled at and wincing at the sharp pain in his knees._

'_Your room is a mess! I know that you don't sleep in there anymore, but still,' she cast about for some reason to get him up there, 'what do you think your mum would do to you if she came by on Order business and saw it like that? I've already sent the mop, broom and bucket up to get to work and I figured that we could work on the desk together."_

_Ron's expression, which had been getting more and more worried since the mention of Molly Weasley, slid into panic at this last statement. _

'_Uh, well, if you're so determined to help me, why don't I handle the desk while you co-ordinate the mop and broom?' he said._

'_Why?' she asked. 'Is there something there that I'm not supposed to see?'_

'_Um, uh, um, uh…' Ron began making assorted stuttering noises and she decided to take pity on him._

'_You had better not have doodled in those books! Madam Pince will skin us alive!' she scolded._

_For some reason, this statement somehow restored Ron's ability to speak._

'_I didn't and you know it,' he said quickly, 'shall we go and get started on your mad cleaning then?'_

_She nodded with a triumphant smirk and followed Ron out of the kitchen, leaving Harry to his bottle of butterbeer, chicken sandwich, biography of The Hogwarts Four and rarely seen grin._

_As they cleaned up his room, she purposefully paid no attention to Ron's desk cleaning. Still, she was fairly certain that she saw his hand dart into his pocket holding a small piece of white as she had _Scourgify-_ed Pig's cage._

A muted cough brought her back to the present. She blinked and realized that Mr. Weasley was looking at her curiously. _Damn, _she thought, and then she suddenly realized where her thoughts had gone… and her cheeks suddenly colored in response.

He smiled gently. "Do I want to know what Ron was doing in that little trip you just took down memory lane?"

"But… wha… how…" she stammered.

He grinned much the same way that Ron did when playing herself or Harry in wizard chess and had them several moves away from a checkmate.

"I've been seeing that same expression on Ginny's face ever since last summer," he said.

Hermione was saved from digging a deeper hole for herself by Ron's much belated return from the teashop, bearing a laden tray of tea, coffee, and various chocolate confections.

Closing the door behind him with a foot, he placed down the tray on one of the end tables and looked anxiously at Ginny and Harry, both as still as when he had left them.

"Did I miss anything?" he asked, staring at the prone figures, not seeing his father and girlfriend smirking behind his back.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

Harry was in the process of trying to convince a seven foot tall stack of books to not tip over onto him- _why, oh why did I stack them this tall?-_ when he heard Ron's muted moan of anguish.

"Harry?"

_Not now, not now, not now, not now, now is REALLY not a good time,_ Harry mentally chanted, not sure if he was talking to the books or to Ron. He tried using his body, leaning up against the pile, which was taller than he was. The heavy books pressed into his back, balanced, as they were, precariously atop the smaller tome that was near the bottom of the pile. _Don't tip, don't tip, don't tip, please don't tip, don't tip, don't tip…_

"Harry!"

_Oh, shite. _

The books shifted behind him as he startled at Ron's call to him. Harry felt the bottom books- the ones sitting right on top of the smaller volume that he had foolishly placed near the bottom of the stack- move and knew that this stack was coming down.

He jumped back from the leaning tower, which promptly heeded the call of gravity and with a sound like, well, like a seven-foot-tall-plus tower of books falling over and crashing to the floor, it fell over and crashed to the floor.

Buried in books up to his calves, Harry sighed and rubbed his leg where a dull pain was throbbing from the impact of one of the books. Reflecting to himself that he should be thankful that it hadn't hit him a foot higher up, he turned to Ron and said, exasperated, "What is it?"

Ron looked at him with such seriousness in his eyes that Harry momentarily felt like apologizing for his curtness a moment before. It was an impulse that quickly disappeared as Ron said, "it's Ginny."

Panic flooded Harry, even more so than it had an hour-plus previously, as…

…_he was standing by the portrait hole and was speaking, "…much less when he's so pressed for time." He turned and pushed open the back of the canvas… and there was a thud from behind him. A thud of a body hitting the floor…_

_He wheeled frantically. Ginny had crumpled to the floor. For some reason, the others hadn't caught her and now they were standing around her, dumbfound expressions on their faces, as if they couldn't believe what they were seeing. He gave an inarticulate cry and ran over to her. _

_Picking her up off of the floor, he got a glance at her face that sent a jolt of fear coursing through his system. Her eyes were open and staring, and empty. He waved his hand in front of them. No response. The jolt rapidly became a current. Yes, he knew, intellectually, that the body he was now cradling against his chest wasn't actually Ginny, but that made no difference to his emotions._

"_Ginny, please, wake up, Move. Give a sign. Ginny, Ginny, please wake up. Please, please, please wake up. Tell me what happened, please. Ginny, please, move, give a sign that you're still in there, do something! Please…"_

_While he had been pleading with the unresponsive avatar, the other fragments had moved back from the spot and were now standing around. Harry heard the portrait hole close; heard it, but didn't register it. His only concern at the moment was Ginny. Desperate for answers to suppress his rising panic, he turned to Hermione._

"_Hermione, what did Tom do to her?"_

_Much to his surprise and mild irritation, Hermione didn't give him an answer. She was staring at the limp form in Harry's embrace with shock written all over her features; a few moments later, she gasped and said, in a tone rich with disbelief, "Oh. My. God."_

_Harry couldn't take it anymore. "What? What is it, Hermione? Is it something to do with Ginny?" He was on the verge of a full on panic._

_Hermione didn't answer right away. Instead, she moved from standing in front of Harry to his side, crouching down to look into Ginny's still open and staring eyes. _

"_Harry, that's Ginny."_

"_I know that, Hermione!" he shot back. He didn't have time for puzzles, not when Ginny, even a copy of Ginny, was in danger. The immediate response, however, struck him with the force of McLaggen's Bludger._

"_No, you don't understand, Harry. That's Ginny Weasley, as in the actual Ginevra Molly Weasley, the first female Weasley in six generations, the girl you love, the one who you made stay behind for her own protection, inside your head."_

_He sat there, on the floor, with Ginny, the real Ginny somehow, in his arms, for several seconds, feeling absolutely stunned. After a few moments, his mind began to process once more, albeit slowly, and he shifted around, moving so he could look at Ginny, who sighed after a moment. _

_This was too much… "But how…?" he asked Hermione, suddenly feeling too drained to even think of any theories in that direction. _

_Before Hermione could answer, Harry became aware of a vibrating sensation near his chest, along with some accompanying sounds._

"_mmm… muuh… muuuuuhhh…" Ginny mumbled into his chest._

_This was becoming too much for him... How the hell was this even _possible? _Taking Ginny by the shoulders, he picked her up off of his chest and turned her around, her face now inches from his own. She blinked. Harry's heart rose at the movement._

"_Ginny…?" he asked, feeling at once both trepidation combined with joy, with a healthy dose of confusion tossed into the mix._

_A few moments later, as Ginny's arms wrapped themselves around him, her lips soft against his own…_

Harry's panic rose, and questions poured out of him, as the scene from the common room played out in his mind's eye.

"Is she alright? Is she hurt? Is she…"

Ron held up his hands, forestalling Harry's flood of questions.

"She's fine, Harry, but you need to go and find her, she's in the Restricted Section, alone, and…"

Harry interrupted, "Why isn't she with Hermione?"

"They decided that they could cover more ground that way."

Harry groaned. "But what's wrong?"

"Harry, please, just listen to me. You need to go and find her, now. You, not one of us."

Tamping down a fresh wave of panic at Ron's ambiguous statement, Harry gazed over the ten foot expanse of books still separating him from Ron. They had dug out a lot of the aisle, but it would take too long to walk back over the way he had come… _ Sod it,_ he thought, pulling his feet free from the books surrounding them.

He walked back to the area he had laboriously cleared. Looking up at Ron, he said, "Ready?"

Ron, knowing what was coming, nodded and braced himself.

Harry took a running start and jumped over the piled chaos of paper, colliding with Ron, knocking them both to the floor. Barely winded, Harry picked himself up and started running in the general direction of the Restricted Section.

Ron watched his robe disappear around a stack two aisles over and, somewhat stunned from the impact, slumped back onto the floor. He knew through the link that the twins were coming to get him and help him back to the entrance to the library.

_Ginny, you are in **so**__much trouble…_

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X_  
_

Ginny felt the sentiment through the connection, but was in too good a mood to care. She was currently sitting cross-legged on the floor, one of the black books in her lap, with a good sized stack of nine or ten others next to her.

She was flipping through her latest book, which, like all of them so far, was an odd mixture of semi-disjointed words and sentences, as if the author had been writing down several trains of thought simultaneously, along with a copious number of illustrations, pictures and images she wasn't exactly sure how to describe, as they came in a variety of different types. One thing was for certain, however. They all gave her a great deal of insight into the mind of Harry Potter.

She stopped near the end of the book, looked at the current page and smiled. The image featured herself and Harry, sleeping, snuggled together under the covers of a large four-poster bed, with a quartet of small children clustered around them, obviously intent on mischief judging by the lights in their green eyes and the grins amid their freckles and flaming red hair.

She closed the book, placed it on the stack and pulled down another of what she had dubbed "The Inner Monster Chronicles" from the shelf.

Opening the new book, she grinned. _Ooh, I like,_ she thought, looking at the picture of herself and Harry.

When she had first looked into these memories of Harry's fantasies and dreams regarding her, she hadn't exactly been sure how to react. First there had been some considerable embarrassment, then, after continuing to flip through the first book she had realized that she had had similar thoughts. Just as frequently. After that little realization had come smug satisfaction, realizing that Harry had her stuck in his thoughts. Daily. And that she was the cause of all of this. Her. Ginny Weasley. She had provoked this in Harry. She was the subject of his every idle moment; she was what he thought about when he wasn't trying to find a way to destroy Tom. Her face, her voice, was what he thought of to calm himself before going to sleep; the memory of her smile was how he managed to get out of bed in the morning. The thought of her, of protecting her, was what kept him sane; although, judging by some of the entries, he was crazy if he though that she would do _that…_ Then again… those ideas had looked like they would be _fun…_

She had started skimming through the books, finding _interesting _idea after _fascinating_ scenario. She already had a mental list of favorites, culled from the pages of Harry's daily daydreams.

There had been the one from the first book she had looked at, which involved the two of them sharing one of the Twins' Daydream Charms. There was one from the middle of the school year involving a shower that had a notation that had made her laugh; _devoutly thankful that Ron cannot perform Legilimency…_ Then she had found an explanation for why Harry had been so distracted and played so poorly during their chess matches during the previous Christmas holiday; he hadn't exactly been paying attention to the board at the time, as he had been thinking of an _interesting _variation that they could have played instead…

Another favorite of hers from the school year concerned the two of them, his Invisibility Cloak, his Firebolt and some midair acrobatics... Then there was one from the same book that had Harry using his Quidditch captainship to gain access to the prefects' bathroom, where they could have fun with the bubbles together… Having never been in there herself, she was intrigued at the idea.

And then there was one from the summer, when he had walked in on Ron and Hermione snogging when they had been at his relations' house; he had wished that she had been there with him as well. Judging from the entry, the wish was partly- mostly- because he missed her terribly, but also that he wanted to see his Uncle's reaction to the two of them with their lips locked together. She smirked, remembering what Ron and Hermione had told her about the Dursleys.

And in the book dating from his seventeenth birthday, which was a hefty ten-odd pounds with an eight-inch wide spine, there had been an entry she had adored. Apparently, that morning, when he had been in the loo, Hermione and Ron had covered his bed with his birthday presents from all and sundry, so that when he had walked back into the room his bedspread had no longer been visible underneath the pile of wrapped boxes.

As much as he had appreciated actually having a proper birthday at number four, Privet Drive for once, and had enjoyed unwrapping the gifts from the faculty at Hogwarts, the rest of the Order, and all of his friends, it would have meant so much more to him if he had come back to find her there, instead of all of the gifts. That, in his wistful musing, she would have been wrapped in his covers, and only his covers, was simply a bonus. _I'm going to have to remember that one for next year…_ she had thought to herself with a slightly evil grin.

And there was one from the day after the wedding, when Fred had played a prank on her by accident- he had been aiming for Phlegm and Gag-rielle- that had coated her with dark, sticky, liquid chocolate. Harry had apparently wished at the time that they could have cleaned up the sweet brown goo in a way that was far less efficient than the shower she had ended up taking but far more fun and much more satisfying… It was interesting, that one, considering that she had also thought wistfully along those lines at the time.

But, so far, her personal favorite was the one she was currently examining, involving, as it did, a Muggle style camping trip for the two of them, complete with a small camping fire to roast sausages and heat water for tea, a non-magical tent, stargazing, something called s'mores… and a single extra-large sleeping bag.

A few moments later, she looked up from the daydream that she had been perusing, which had been about a third of the book further in from the camping trip, one involving Harry counting her freckles- _all _of her freckles.

He was nearby. She could feel his panic and anxiety, not knowing what he was going to find. Judging by the impressions she was getting, he was nearing the entrance to the Restricted Section and running at full tilt, his apprehension and concern for her filling his mind.

She glanced down at the non-moving images of her and Harry - some of them moved, some didn't, she wasn't sure why- and grinned. _There's no reason why I can't have a little bit of fun with this, is there? _

Ignoring the mental howls of protest coming from the other fragments at this, she quickly schooled her features away from the current expression of mischief that would have impressed the twins, and towards a look of disappointment and rage.

Quickly, she flipped back through the book to the camping daydream and, holding a finger in between the pages to mark the spot, she stood and faced the entrance to the aisle. Just in time.

He was here.

"Ginny, are you alright?" Harry turned the corner and looked at her. "Ginny, what's wrong? Are you hurt? I mean, Ron just told me to come and find you; he wouldn't give me any details…"

He had caught sight of her expression, which was currently in a state of being a testament to her acting skills.

"Ginny…?" he asked hesitantly.

"The question is not, am I alright, _Harry,_ but will you be alright when I'm finished with you," she said, in her best 'dangerous' tone.

He looked utterly flummoxed.

"Uh, what do you mean…?"

She gave him a grin which was all teeth, flopped open the book in her arms and handed it to him.

To say that she had a difficult time keeping her glee from her face at the expression on his would be an understatement of epic proportions.

She fought to keep a smile, a real smile, from her face as Harry rapidly turned a color that any Weasley would be impressed by. His embarrassment would have been palpable even without the link; with it, she could play him like a fiddle.

Harry was thinking dimly to himself through the red haze of complete and utter mortification, _well, that answers the question as to where the rest of my daydreams went…_ He looked back down at the picture on the page. He remembered that one… he had been reading the _Daily Prophet _a few weeks back and had wandered over to the sports section; one of the writers had had an article about the next Quidditch World Cup and England's probable lineup.

The thought of the last Cup and the magical camping that they had done had made him think about the times that the Dursleys' friends had gone on trips (the Dursleys themselves had never gone camping; Dudley had whined at the mere thought of being separated from his telly, computer and refrigerator) and that he himself would have liked to have gone camping once... and then his mind had wandered, of course, over to the one person he would like to have taken along with him.

He continued to look at the image of himself and Ginny putting on suntan lotion… on each other. It was a physical impossibility, he was certain, be he still could have sworn that the heat in his face increased significantly when he looked back up at Ginny.

"Um, uh… eh… eep…" No good. His voice had gone up at least two, perhaps three octaves. He coughed and tried again. "I'm, uh, I'm, uh, I'm sorry?" he said in as meek a voice as had ever issued from his throat.

Fiercely fighting to keep her amusement from her face, she said, ignoring the loud chorus of continuing mental objections coming over the link, "You had better be. If I could use my wand right now…" She let the statement hang, watching Harry's face contort as mild fear vied with his embarrassment as she felt through the link him cataloguing every single curse and hex she knew; it was a very complete list, unsurprisingly, as he had taught her most of them.

Grinning, she stepped closer to him and to the side. His eyes widened with mild panic as he remembered what she had done to McLaggen, and, dropping the book with a muted _thump_ he stepped back from her…

_Thunk!_

…and collided with the shelf behind him. By moving to the side, she had made him turn so that his back was to the bookshelves. As she took another step closer, cat-like, having cornered her mouse, his expression descended into full code-red panic mode.

"Uh, oh sorry Gin, Ginny… um, Ginevra, I _did _say I'm sorry…"

She gave him another toothy grin, reached up and tangled her hands in his messy hair. He winced in anticipation and braced himself, clearly awaiting the pain of a large number of follicles violently parting company with his scalp.

She leaned in close and said, in the barest whisper, "Harry, you talk too much…" and, having a firm grip on his hair, pulled him into a kiss.

The feelings of utter confusion coming from the poor boy were almost as delicious as his lips.

He tried to pull out of the kiss for a few moments; she simply held onto his hair and didn't let his head move away. After a few moments he seemed to get the message and stopped resisting her; through the link, she felt that his confusion was still there, and rather prominent, but now it had competition- his passion.

Now his hands rose up from his sides and clasped themselves in _her _hair, the hair that she knew he loved, loved playing with it, loved the feeling of running his hands through it, loved seeing the light playing off of it, loved it because it was a part of _her_, and that alone was reason enough for him.

After another few moments, however, she broke the kiss and looked up into his eyes, green and glassy.

"Harry?"

He met her gaze, his mind obviously trying its best to catch up with what had just happened.

"Ginny, but… but… you were…"

She silenced him with a finger on his lips.

"I was just teasing you, Harry. I enjoyed looking through these great ideas of yours. Speaking of which, when do you want to play that chess game?"

Harry looked at her, still somewhat dazed.

"But, but, you were all upset with me… just teasing me…" Then his mind caught up with his ears. "What chess game?"

She motioned with her hand to the books on the floor.

"_That_ chess game, Harry."

He looked at the books on the floor, still confused. Then, comprehension lit his features and he started babbling.

"But Gin, um, ah, eh, I don't think that's a very good idea… I mean, if someone…"

He stopped talking when her lips met his again for a moment.

"Harry, you're still talking too much…"

He got the hint and kissed her.

She held him close, her fingers still entwined in his unruly hair, while his hands were tracing out the most _amazing _patterns on her lower back, patterns that were making her go weak in the knees…

_Thud…_

…perhaps too weak, as they gave out from under her and she tumbled to the floor, taking him with her. Not that they minded too much. She didn't care that she had landed atop one of the books, whose cover was digging painfully into her shoulder. She didn't care that Harry had landed on top of her when they had toppled. All she cared about at the moment was Harry and that they had this moment for just the two of them, together.

Rolling on top of him, she let go of his hair and began toying with his ears, batting them this way and that, eliciting pleased moans from him as his talented fingers had given up on caressing her back through the cloak and were currently searching for a way in through the tangled black fabric to do that job more directly…

_Ginny…_

She didn't even care that the other fragments were trying to get her attention because Voldemort had reappeared on the map…

_Ginny…_

She took hold of a lock of Harry's hair and began tickling his ear with it. He, in the meantime, was…

_GINNY WEASLEY!_

Ginny jumped, breaking the kiss, her name reverberating inside of her skull, giving her a headache.

"Ginny, what is it?" Harry asked as she sat up on his thighs, his eyes glassy and full of desire.

Rubbing her temples to fight off the nascent migraine, she said tiredly, her voice full of disappointment and longing, "Voldemort's reappeared on the map."

She resisted the urge to shiver as she felt the feral rage against Voldemort join his love for her through the link and in his eyes.

Standing up, she helped him to his feet, and gave him a quick kiss ("For luck").

As they left the aisle and began walking towards the entrance to the Restricted Section, Ginny noticed something out of the corner of her eye.

Stopping, she turned to Harry, who also stopped and looked at her quizzically.

"What is it, Gin?"

"I thought I saw something… hold on a second…"

Harry, obviously curious as to what she had seen, nodded.

She headed back the way that they had come, stopping at an aisle just two rows over from the one with her name on it.

Quickly peeking at the stacks, she blinked, as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing. Then she burst out laughing, and, darting out of the aisle, ran back to Harry, embracing him in a flying tackle.

"What? What is it?" he asked, his urgency about Voldemort momentarily eclipsed by her strange behavior.

She grinned at him.

"Oh, it's nothing, nothing. Shall we?" she said, indicating the direction of the entrance.

As they walked towards the other fragments, Harry asked her repeatedly about the what was in that aisle and each time she would continue beaming like an idiot and say, obviously deeply amused, "Nothing."

And it was true, because, out of an entire, almost empty aisle, the books labeled _Cho Chang _only filled two-thirds of a single bookcase.

--------

A/N: And that would be my favorite chapter yet posted, and for obvious reasons grin I had so much fun writing this… well, you can imagine :-)


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